Hello Kitchens Forum,

I'm in the process of tweaking my kitchen cabinets and layout. The design has two walls of cabinetry (one with a wall oven and storage cabinets, and another with the cleanup sink, dishwasher, and a 36" counter-depth refrigerator), as well as a 12x5' island, with the range centered. This image shows what the current layout looks like:

It's been of growing concern to me that the 36" fridge may not be enough space. In a past house I had a 48" counter-depth fridge and the freezer space was minimal and the fridge a little tight. This was before we had children. Now we have a little one, and eventually there will be more mouths to feed. I had figured we could have a fridge in the garage (about 20 feet away), but having to run out and get something from the garage is a bad failure mode, especially given the size of house (~5000sqft).

Due to some complexity of design (it's a remodel), I can't use any fridge wider than 36" on the sink wall. So if I wanted a larger fridge I'd have to switch the fridge with the wall oven on the other wall. I mocked this option up using a 24" integrated freezer and a 36" integrated fridge unit (both counter depth):

The downside of this is that my tight work triangle seems to be compromised.

What are your opinions? Am I missing anything? Am I overthinking this?

Notes:

- I've pondered variants of keeping the current 36" and adding some fridge/freezer drawers, but this has been more disruptive to my cabinetry so I don't think that'll work.
- I've also pondered door swings on the integrated fridge/freezer in my second mockup above. I'm now wondering if I should reverse the swing of the fridge/freezer from what's shown, to make the fridge easier to access from the prep zone.

This post was edited by caben on Sun, Oct 6, 13 at 3:15