I would try another full height, shallow depth pantry cabinet, rotated 90 degrees to it backed into the other pantry cabinet. Same thing with shallow bookshelves and with angled corner shelves. Also maybe try two full height, single door pantry cabinets or slightly smaller full height pantry cabinets with wine bottle cubbies between them on one side of the ref. It's really hard to tell aisle and such from a perspective drawing - they can be really misleading. So take this will a little salt. It looks like you have about a three foot aisle between the fronts of the pantries and the peninsula. Even if you get a counter depth ref, it will still come out into the aisle about six inches including the doors and the handles. Plus another inch or two will go to adding decorative panels on the end of the peninsula cabinets and the countertop overhang. So you're aisle may turn out to be more like 28" there. Can the ref be maneuvered into or out of its place without removing the peninsula? Can you open the freezer completely? Are you ok with having to close the freezer door, walk by it and re-open to reach something on the other side?

@mama goose_gw zn6OH, thank you very much for the additional information! Thankfully my husband works for an HVAC (and plumbing/electrical) company so he will be in charge of the hood. We haven't gotten that far in the planning process but it'll be good to know to plan for it to overhang by 6". On the oven note, I'm really unsure how that will play out. I like the idea of having a range where everything is all together in my work zone. It just depends on what we can find that suits our needs and budget. If it ends up as a range, we can still plan on the microwave being there in some kind of cabinet configuration. @3onthetree, you've raised some excellent questions. The start of the new stairs will be inside the new addition. The middle section will go over what is currently just an open niche in our bedroom (which we will enclose as a small storage closet). A few of the stairs will locate in what is currently some built-in storage over the basement stairs, accessed from the storage niche in our bedroom. The location of the starting point of the stairs will be a balancing act between keeping enough head height where the support beam will run across the stairs and the distance the stairs extend out into the usable attic floor space. We need to maintain head clearance under the beam but we also want to maintain as much usable attic floor space as possible so we have as much floor space to work with as possible. We do plan to eventually put in a bedroom and a bathroom in the attic; we have consulted the IRC 2018 (which is what our local jurisdiction requires) to ensure that we're meeting the required minimum room areas and ceiling heights. As for the roof - I need to preface this with the fact that I'm not an architect - but this is the roof design that I've come up with so far. I'm going to pick my boss's brain (she's a licensed architect) to see if she thinks there are any better ways to design this. But it's what I've got so far as a starting point. Exterior modeling is not my forte so again, this is rudimentary. I would like to design some kind of "eyebrow" over the exterior door that will shelter from rain, even if slightly. Just haven't gotten that far yet. And yes, we're expecting we will need a laminated beam to run across where the exterior wall will be removed. We will be hiring a structural engineer to assist with analyzing everything and also to help determine what we need to do for our attic floor joists. We know that we will need to sister in bigger boards to beef everything up to support the finished space - just need to find out what will actually be required. To your earlier point (the stair design), once we've got an engineer on board and determine the size, height, and location of the structural beam, I can nail down exactly where the stairs should start. In regards to circulation, what is really funny is that you sketched in an opening exactly where one used to be in the original design of our home! Before we purchased our home, it was remodeled by a contractor who walled in an existing doorway into that hallway in order to make the kitchen more functional. I can't imagine just how tiny that original kitchen must have been with another doorway there! But, back to your point, with the size of our house, I really don't want to sacrifice usable space for additional circulation. I go on walks daily with the purpose to get extra steps in my life. A few in my house isn't going to hurt anything and those with far larger homes walk many more steps than we will. Not an issue for us but I really appreciate you steering me to think about the design from different perspectives! In regards to sizing things proportionately to the home, we have had LOTS of these kinds of discussions over the years. "Cozy" is a nice way to describe our house :) When first putting pen to paper, I was actually looking at a smaller addition. And then the contractor we spoke with said we might as well go a little bit bigger because there are so many costs associated with just getting people on the job that a few more feet in this size of addition/remodel won't make a huge cost difference, beyond just paying for the normal SF costs. Also, while I don't feel the need to deep dive into all of the personal aspects of our decision-making on here, we did spend a few years of our lives mulling over whether we wanted to stay in our home or get into a bigger, more expensive house. We "shopped" a lot during that timeframe. And, we ultimately decided to stay in our smaller home for a variety of reasons. Our personal attitude is a bit of a "YOLO" approach to our home; we have decided to make it the way we want it as we're planning to stay here for years. We feel like it's the right decision for us. So unless the bids come in astronomically high and just don't make sense, we're going to proceed with the project. A bonus for us is the fact that my husband is very experienced in MEP (and licensed on the HVAC side of it) so he can take care of a chunk of some of the expensive components of this kind of project himself, which will help bring down our project costs. What he can't complete, we will hire out through his employer, which will be at a discounted rate. So, that's how we ended up where we're at, in a nutshell. I really appreciate you asking questions that help us think through different aspects of our project. Thank you very much!

if you could move the entry to/from dining to the far right on that wall youd have a direct walkway from garage..... as you come in..turn left to get to living zone....and also eliminates the view into the smallish kitchen from living room completely. then i might think about a U shape kitchen with the wrapping of 3 sides a possibility . I would not do either of the two plans shown until I explored repositioning of that opening in/out of kitchen .

Gave this a whirl. The "plans" that were shown to you are giving a false impression of what you can do here. There was no ref in that plan and the room is not big enough across to fit an island with 3 people seated across ( 132 - 84 " island - walk space in front of bedroom door 36" = 12" left for the other walkways and those cabinets showing on the wall shared with the teen bedroom! For that mudroom area - move the door to the teen bedroom all the way to one side or the other - it is interrupting the wall which will affect the storage. Plan on a pantry in there or the laundry for kitchen overflow. The kitchen window isn't centered - not sure if you can move it to help make a better layout Here is my attempt at something that might work You could swap the ref and the stove, but then the tv couldn't go there. Get some graph paper and drawer the room to scale. Cut out pieces for furniture, appliances etc to scale and see what you can come up with. Good luck!