I like your house, Chelsea. Beautifully simple, and your kitchen ideas overall look pretty good. I was just wondering, though, for a long room like that, have you considered an even simpler layout of counter across the east wall faced with a long island paralling that? The sink would be in the island, apparently. The reasons I like this is are that the east wall carefully laid out, it can look wonderful from the other end of the room; it's very efficient, tightening up the work flow; you get to work facing out into the room more; there are no corner-storage problems; and not narrowing the space with cabinets on the north and south walls would make that end of your living area feel nice and spacious. The counters would frame the window at the end, which can be a very nice effect, and your idea of a deeper counter sounds really good and could be applied to the east wall.

Lavender_Lass, I'm glad to hear you love your wall oven! Everyone who has one seems to. I think I'll enjoy it, myself, and DH is already thrilled with the idea - he's even been checking them out at appliance stores, and he's never been that interested in ovens before. I agree that the space would really open up without the peninsula. We could do a small table and keep it simple at first, but we'd have the room in the future to expand a little, add chairs. Ashleymking, I actually love the open counter space of the peninsula, myself, and if it weren't for DH's bad back and therefore the desire for a wall oven, I'd almost certainly keep the peninsula. The 30" walkway is definitely too narrow, though - I would gladly sacrifice the peninsula space for a larger walkway. It feels cramped just looking at it from across the room. This may not apply in your layout, but for us, looking in through the dining room door, the peninsula actually extends into that line of sight, so if you walk straight across the room you could walk into it. More importantly, it's a real bottleneck for people passing through. Only one person can comfortably pass at a time (2 if you don't mind brushing up against one another!), and with an active 3-yr-old and 2 little dogs, we feel like we're constantly telling someone to get out of the way. This is compounded by the layout of the refrigerator being just off the end of the peninsula, so the walkway is totally blocked if someone opens the fridge door. It doesn't sound like a big deal - of course you can just wait a moment until the person at the fridge is done - but it annoys us every day. We felt that between 40 - 44" would work for us, larger being better. We arrived at that number partly by looking at recommendations in posts here on GW and partly by looking at the sight lines through the doors, measuring ourselves standing there 2-deep and just imagining "what if I wanted to do X..." scenarios. Well, there's my novel about our walkway, LOL! Hope that's useful to you. Marthasdream, it's funny, I had considered open shelving for the plans with the peninsula but didn't think of it with the wall oven/ open plan. Thanks for the reminder that they could still work there! My open shelf fantasy is actually to have a set of 2 or 3 with some room on one for cookbooks, and the bottom shelf having hooks for my most-often used pans. Perhaps the dream isn't dead!

Sorry to be slow to respond socal_gal. The undercabinet exhaust fan vents to the outside. The vent pipe comes out of the back of the unit, turns, and goes up inside the wall between the studs at a size of 3 1/4" x 14", above the cabinets it transitions to a 8" circular vent and goes through the roof. From everything I've heard recirculating range fans are largely pointless, and the downdraft fans are not a whole lot better. One question I have is if you go with a downdraft fan, where does the air go to? At one point in my design when I was leery of cutting a hole in my roof, I was considering using the same overhead range hood and routing the duct down the wall, along the underside of the floor and out through the basement wall beneath the deck. So, if you can use a downdraft fan and vent it outside, it may well also be possible to use the same model of undercabinet fan as I did (which can be configured to blow straight out the back) and route the duct down and out in the same way as a downdraft fan would. -Bob

mama goose, thank you--I'll look into that pullout corner unit! Unfortunately, the fridge I used in the NKBA tool was 30", as there were only 30" and 36" choices. I'm pretty sure they need at least a 33" fridge. We looked at smaller units at the 2 big box stores and the smaller units are mainly being marketed at an entry level and are apartment size. But this was not an complete search, and we did not look for specialty brands (Liebherr, etc.) which cost more. (It is amazing how goods are being "super-sized" now. There are actually not very many fridges in stock under ~34"!) DS and FDIL actually do cook a lot and have had trouble for the past few years living in an apartment. I think that they would pick the larger fridge vs. continuous counter space in that particular location. This post is a way of defining the choices that should be made, using knowledge gained from GardenWeb. Thank you and others who give your time to think about this. My son is amazed by the responses!