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foxxwell

Layout advice

Foxxwell
9 years ago

There are just the two of us, I do about two-thirds of the cooking and DH the rest. We're in New Zealand with a country-style cottage on a farm.

The kitchen is small and works reasonably well for one person, buts get crowded as soon as someone else walks in. Particular current layout annoyances are:
1. That the dishwasher (a special narrow one only 17.7" wide that we had put in when we moved in 8 years ago) opens against the cabinet where plates are stored, so you have to take the dishes out of the dishwasher, stack them on the counter, then close the DW, then put the dishes away.
2. There is no built-in trash and recycling.
3. There is no landing space to the left of the cooktop.
4. The aisle between the pantry and the end of the peninsula is 30" which would be OK... except the pantry bifold doors open into that space and make it even narrower.

The dining area (no separate dining room) is also quite small and only accommodates 4 around a round table comfortably. Also the dining table is in the way of the french doors to the deck.

We'd like to have a counter that we can sit at for breakfast and for talking to the cook.

Here is the current layout. I've done the layout in Excel and to scale -one box is 10cms - but I have added measurements in inches because I realise that's what you'll be used to.

And here is my first attempt at a new layout:

it keeps almost the same footprint in the kitchen with two exceptions:

1. Moving fridge to wall (hopefully we can have a 3" filler so that we can open the door wide). This looks much better and also gives us landing space to the left of the cooktop which we didn't have before.
2. Adding a cabinet to the sink counter (17.7" wide) to slightly enlarge the kitchen and enable more streamlined unloading of the DW (we still have the old cabinet door from when the DW was installed so hopefully we can reuse this).
2. Adding a cabinet on the sink counter.

The biggest difference is in the dining area. More room there and in particular:

1. Room to have a seating area at the kitchen counter.
2. Better access to the deck.
3. Able to seat more people at the dining table. It's an extensible table but currently if we have a lot of people round we move all the living room furniture to the walls and move the dining table in there!

Looking forward to your critique and ideas that I haven't thought of.

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