Moving kitchen location...thoughts???

10 years ago

We recently purchased a mid 1980's house rather than building new. One of the biggest considerations is the location of the kitchen. We really want a more open kitchen that has island/bar seating and lends well to entertaining. We do a lot of informal entertaining with a couple of people in the kitchen and some more formal every once in a while. Would we gain anything by swapping the kitchen with the dining room? The rooms are similar size but we could get a bar between the kitchen and breakfast room. It's very early in the process but wanted to get some thoughts on this. I've attached a copy of the original floor plan as it is today.

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Comments (5)

annkh_nd
10 years ago
Do you use both the breakfast room and dining room? They seem redundant (spoken as someone who has only one place to sit down and eat).

Does the kitchen work for you as it is? The corner oven has no landing space, and seems to waste a lot of space, but other than that it seems a decent layout.

Do you want the kitchen adjacent to the living room? If so, I would make the breakfast room the dining room, add another window to the left wall of the kitchen, and make a gorgeous sun room out of the existing kitchen. But only you can decide the best use of space for your family.
GauchoGordo1993
10 years ago
I'd definitely consolidate dining. Seems like a crazy waste of space to have two nearly identical dining areas as in current layout.

Regarding the proposed switch, I'd exhaust alternatives leaving the kitchen where it is first beause moving it will add a lot of cost. So I'd start with consolidating dining to the current breakfast nook and removing the wall between the kitching and formal dining room.

Do you have a raised foundation? If so, then it's often relatively inexpensive to add square footage like in the pic below without modifying the foundation. That is, you can rest a beam on the existing foundation at each end, and then hang floor joists from the beam. Of course you need to consider the roofline and whatnot though.
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done_again_2
Original Author
10 years ago
Annkh-We don't need the 2 dining spaces plus a bar. They are redundant as we generally use the formal DR most often. We already have a large sunroom off the FR so another is out. We would put a large round table in the new formal DR and just something small in the breakfast room. It has doors to the back patio and gets a lot of traffic. It's too small and has too much traffic for the main DR. The current kitchen works okay for us. The corner oven/microwave wall seems wasteful.

GauchoGordo1993-The house is on a full basement so access is pretty easy underneath. The island you drew is similar to what we were thinking. The kitchen would be open to both DR and breakfast with a view to the FR.

Heres the current kitchen. It's vaulted with faux beams and would make a near DR with larger windows and a view of the property.
robo (z6a)
10 years ago
Moving the kitchen is expensive for sure. We're doing it! We're just starting so I can't give you any words of wisdom. I figure the impact to our budget is roughly an extra $25,000 ON TOP OF the budget to gut and remodel an existing kitchen. Only you can decide if your cost is worth it to you. For us it is totally worth it, but we're in a good place cashwise and don't need to 'make our money back' on the remodel.

I figure for us it's $8000-10,000 to move plumbing and electrical, $2000 for structural, $3000 for new door and window, and $10000 to finish the room the kitchen used to be in. We are saving some cash because our basement is unfinished with unfinished ceilings which means everything is easier to run. But are spending more because the old owners cut a lot of corners (i.e. not running flooring under cabs, installing terrible cracking tile) which means we have to tear out almost everything they did and gut two rooms instead of one. The way our old kitchen worked was frightful and it would have cost a lot to fix it one way or the other (our alternatives included build laundry room upstairs, move a powder room plus move structural post, etc). So we just bit the bullet and are doing what we think does the best justice to us and the house.

In your situation your kitchen looks functional (but isolated) so I'm wondering if a big floor plan rethink might be useful before undertaking the extra expense?
done_again_2
Original Author
10 years ago
robotropolis-Thanks for sharing the rough numbers. I expect it will add a significant amount to the overall cost. It would be much simpler to replace what's in the existing space but it'll remain isolated.

Who would be the best person to contact first about further exploring such a change...contractor, kitchen designer, architect, etc? If moving the kitchen isn't the best thing overall we still plan to replace the cabinets, counters, and appliances.

This post was edited by done_again on Wed, Jan 15, 14 at 14:53