Next steps:
1. get all measurements of current kitchen and make up a plan.
2. setup "temporary" kitchen area in dining room and pack most stuff away
2. "demo" current kitchen. pull out current cabs, move appliances out of the way, try very hard not to damage walls
3. put together new kitchen!

HA! If only it were that easy. I'm going to post in the kitchen forum too but since this is where I usually 'hang out' I wanted to post here first =D If anyone has any demo/renovation advice I'd be happy to hear it.

There is tons of renovation experience and support over there.

Most helpful thing we did was to draw the exact kitchen outlines on graph paper and create little graph paper squares for each and every cabinet we were getting. Then we played Dollhouse Kitchen for a while until we really liked the layout. We did wind up using all the lowers but didn't use three of the uppers -- it was a big high-end kitchen.

Another thing to look into: how flexible are your plumbing and gas lines? What are all the most logical places for the stove/cooktop according to your current piping/wiring? Could you add plumbing for another sink if you wanted to? If you want to move the location of the fridge and need an icemaker line, can you do that? Our kitchen is right above our unfinished 1922 basement, so we had full access to all piping and wiring, thankfully, and were able to move stuff around at will.

Think outside the box! We didn't want any corner cabinets, so we used a lower corner for a corner prep sink base instead. We stuck three cabs together and slapped a bookshelf on the back of them to make a nice wide peninsula. We used a wall oven cab for a farm sink base. We used extra upper doors to make a dishwasher panel.

In some ways I think it was a lot more fun because of the challenges and limitations -- easier to get started with given puzzle pieces than being overwhelmed by a big blank space. :-)

Congrats!

Thanks so much for the great advice so far! I measured EVERYTHING in the kitchen some months back so we went and bought some graph paper, thinking to play dollhouse (love that term) but I was quickly defeated by the math! Luckily, last night I grabbed the Sunset kitchen book from the library and there was the answer! This Punch! software that was on a dvd with it is pretty cool. I put together last night the walls/windows/doors, pantries, oven/stove, sink and frige as they are now and saved it as my 'base' design. I need to remeasure all the cabs when they get here since I don't trust the measurements we were given. If we like the software for the kitchen I think we will just buy the home design package for all the future stuff as well. Oh I wish I was at home playing with it now!

We do have access to the piping and wiring from the basement ... I'm going to really think about that. We want to move the frige, which would involve moving the electric switch just a little, but I hadn't thought about the sink. Probably stuck with the stove/oven where it is though. That doesn't seem to be a DIY job?

Anyway, I've been interrupted 3 times while trying to write this so obviously I have to get back to the real job :(

Circuspeanut - I did a search but could not find your kitchen. Any pics I can see for inspiration?

The pickup today when semi-smoothly. There was a bit of trouble with the counters so there is 1 that broke into 2 parts (in an ok place thankfully) and some cracks. I'll worry about that after getting the layout nailed down. A little damage to the bottom of 1 lower cab, but still better then what I have today.