My second and third drawer are the same height. Those drawer fronts are 12 inches and the top drawer is 6-1/2 inches. My cabinets are framed so as Ginny20 noted the drawer boxes are not the same measurement as the drawer fronts. Also be aware that if your drawers are going under a cooktop you will need to check the cooktop specs for the clearance needed for the drawer immediately below it. Some people have been surprised to find they couldn't have a drawer below their cooktop. My cooktop only needed 1/4 inch clearance to combustibles below it but the sides of my drawer box still needed to be cut down a little. The drawers needed some further adjustments in the front to back length of the drawer box to clear the gas regulator or some such part that hung down below the cooktop. The carpenter then fashioned an angled piece of wood to the drawer box so that the drawer would be attached properly to the glides and still be able to have the soft close feature. Hope the picture helps clarify what I said.

Thanks everyone for your responses! These are very helpful. We have been thinking through our options for moving various bathrooms or taking over the mechanical space. Unfortunately, there seems to be challenges with most of the ideas we've had. These two floors are all the space we have - no basement or cellar. We're in a historic district in Washington DC, so any additions would be a heavy lift. We have thought about selling and moving, but we would need to renovate the kitchen and bathrooms before we sold since they are all pretty out of date. The fact that we have a two and a half bathrooms is fairly rare for a house this size in this neighborhood, but since they were one of the main selling points of the house for us, it would be tough to give any of them up. On relocating the half bath downstairs, my wife likes the fact that it now opens into a hallway and not directly into the living/dining space. This limits where we can move the bathroom, The closet underneath the stairs would need to be expanded to hold the half bath, the full height section is too narrow and not long enough to meet code. Also, the kitchen/bathroom hallway wall parallel to the stairs is load bearing. We'd probably be able to put in a column and beam, but that's a factor that will likely drive up the cost of opening up the downstairs. We have thought about relocating the washer and dryer upstairs into the small step-in closet with the chimney that buehl mentioned. There is space for a 24in washer/dryer in the back of the closet, but keeping access to it would waste the rest of the closet space. We hadn't thought about reworking that space with the other closet and hall bathroom. Thanks for the suggestion! I'll think though how we could get it to work. I'd love to hear your ideas. If we relocated the washer dryer, we could move the doorway into the mechanical room to the main area from the kitchen. That would give us the ability to add more counter space in the existing kitchen space. The wall where the refrigerator is too narrow for the 36in fridge. We would either need to close the doorway into the mechanical room or widen the doorway into the hallway. Venting for the hood will be a challenge from the current kitchen. Our options are to run the vent pipe up through the bedroom above or out the back using the space between the floors - there is about 2 feet of space between the ceiling joists downstairs and the floor joists above. going out the front is a no go in the historic district. But before I give up the plan to move the kitchen into the living space, let me ask, what do you think about the one wall kitchen idea? Is 14.5 feet too little to make a usable kitchen? Is there a way to design it so that it doesn't feel like it takes over the rest of the space? By the way, the sewer line goes back through the rear of the house, so at least we have that on our side.

Without knowing anything about you and your family's needs, it's difficult to say whether you should get a 30" or a 36" range. How many burners do you regularly use? How many do you need when you entertain (if you do) and for holiday dinners? If 4 won't cut it, get a 36" range. Your kitchen is large enough to accommodate a 30" wall oven, too. Personally, I'd prefer to use the smaller oven most of the time so that I'm not working over a hot oven while cooking on the range. Another option would be to do a 36" cook top, a 30" wall oven and a 30" speed oven (MW combo, multi-function). Separate appliances cost more but, as DrB477 pointed out, 36" ranges are spendy. You didn't ask for lay-out advice but your lay-out doesn't make the best use of your kitchen's footprint. Your fridge and range are crowded together and your island's angled shape puts the sink farther away from perimeter counters than recommended, plus it provides limited counter space. Given the opportunity to take advantage of your misfortune (my sympathies), it seems a shame not to consider addressing these issues at the same time. Are you on a slab? Even if you are, can you move plumbing at all? If so, here's one possibility that relieves appliance crowding and gives you a larger island with more counter on each side of the sink plus a lot more room to work on each side of the range, and better work aisle widths. Do you have pantry space somewhere? Or are you doing pantry cabinets? There's room to add them to the above plan, either between wall oven/MW and fridge, creating a "wall of tall" or at one end or the other of the range run. Good luck with your rebuild! PS. If your fridge is a standard depth fridge, you may want to allow a wider aisle between fridge run and island. Or you could investigate recessing the fridge into the stud space a few inches.

A common problem that I find in a lot of initial postings to this forum is kitchen remodels being driven by the desired list of features. In principle, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. In fact, you should identify the features that you need and then build your kitchen around it. But inevitably, the answer then turns out to be that a bigger range is required. And that's typically not true. Very few homechefs need 8+ burners. It's really hard to keep more than a handful of burners in active use. Once you realize that, you are back to a more conservatively sized 30" or 36" range or range-top. And you start thinking about adding other appliances to fill the remaining needs that you might have. This could be a second wall oven, it could be a combination steam oven (awesome choice!), a microwave speed oven, a microwave drawer, a warming drawer, or built-in sous-vide facilities. Or of course, any combination of these appliances. Also, once you separate your needs into specialized appliances, you have more choices in both gas and/or induction models that fit your needs.