Yesterday morning I took some time to play around with the kitchen layout in the IKEA kitchen planner, based on the new idea of moving our kitchen into the dining area. If you missed that plan, you can go back to the previous post and read about the decision-making process and why I chose to do things that way.
But if you don’t want all the explanations and just want to see the map, here it is…
As you can see, the new kitchen will be in the space that is now the breakfast nook and pantry. It will be open to the dining room with a large recessed space. That large recessed space is already there, but right now it is between the kitchen and the breakfast nook with a peninsula separating the two rooms. Currently, it looks like this…
The plan is to move the kitchen sink to the front window wall of the breakfast room/living room and close the door from the breakfast room to my den. And then this wall separating the living room from the pantry will be removed. I built that wall myself and it’s nothing more than 2×4’s and drywall. There’s nothing structural in that wall (i.e. not load bearing) and there’s nothing in the wall like electricity or water. So removing that will be a piece of cake.
My mom and I laughed at the fact that removing that wall basically brings me back to how this room originally looked when we bought this house. It was just one big, open room with two windows on the far wall. And there was a door on the left, which I closed off and will be added back for the new layout.
I know the idea of undoing and redoing things bothers some people a lot, but I own the house and it doesn’t bother me one bit. These rooms have served us well while we’ve had them. Matt’s living room has been very useful to him and I’ve gotten a lot of use out of the pantry. But I’m okay with moving to a more efficient layout that will serve us even more well. Those rooms were fun to work in, they were great to live in, and the next ones will be great too.
Anyway, all that being said, I wanted to play around with the IKEA kitchen planner just to get an idea of what a kitchen in this area would look like. And remember, the studio bathroom is going to be converted into a pantry, so that will give me more storage space. But for now, I just wanted to focus on this room, which is 21 feet long and 12′ 3″ wide.
I haven’t taken the time to figure out the exact layout of drawers and such yet. For now, I’ve only used cabinets with drawers for the bottom and haven’t considered what items I would store where. So some of those cabinets will surely be swapped out for other types of cabinets. But I just wanted to get a general idea of what a kitchen would look like in that room and this is what I came up with as a starting point.
Starting with the front wall, I put the sink centered on the windows. I chose to put the sink here instead of on the back wall of this room because the back wall has a sloped ceiling. The current pantry ceiling slopes from eight feet to seven feet on the back wall. I’m sure that could be changed, but I don’t know if it would be worth the cost. And I don’t really care if my sink faces the front or back yard, as long as the sink is under the windows. That’s my only requirement. It’s what I’ve envisioned since I started talking about and planning a new kitchen, so it’s a non-negotiable item.
So here is the sink below the front windows with the opening to the dining room (i.e. the current kitchen) on the right.
The “camera” view of this screenshot makes the proportions look really far off, but this is the 21 foot wall. The current door from the breakfast room into my den is roughly where those cabinets between the fridge and stove are. So that would be closed off and a door would be added to the back of the room (to the left of the fridge) that leads to what is now the studio bathroom, but will be a pass-through pantry leading to the back doors of the den. Again, try not to be confused by this perspective. The view looks really stretched out from the foreground to the fridge wall. That distance from the foreground to the fridge/stove wall is actually only 12′ 3″ wide, while the actual fridge/stove wall is 21 feet long. I don’t know why the perspective and proportions look so distorted.
And here you see the back corner with the door to the pantry and a portion of the back wall. Again, the back wall of the kitchen is where the current pantry is located. I simply put lower cabinets wall to wall and as many upper cabinets as I could fit on that wall.
Here you can see the back wall facing forward where the current pantry is located. The smaller opening on the left leads to the new family room, making this back wall of the counter a perfect place to serve buffet style food when we have guests over.
And then this is the wall with the large opening that leads to the dining room on the left and the smaller opening that leads to the family room on the right.
So this is a fun first look at what a kitchen would look like in that space. I’m toying with the idea of adding an island, but I haven’t decided yet. In fact, none of this is decided. This was just a fun exercise to start thinking about this room as a kitchen and to imagine the possibilities.
There are still many questions to be answered, such as:
- I would like to have a beverage refrigerator and a small 15 inch nugget ice maker built in, so where can I place those items?
- Will I keep my stand-alone freezer? And if so, where will I put it? Is there enough space in the pantry? (I think so.)
- Is it reasonable to raise the ceiling at the back of the room so that the entire room has an eight foot ceiling with no slope at the back?
- If it doesn’t cost me an arm and a leg to raise the roof at the back, am I really as indifferent as I think I am about which end my kitchen sink goes on? (I really don’t know the answer to this question.)
- If I add an island, how big would it be? If the kitchen is centered on the large framed opening (which my brain tells me it has to be because…symmetry), then there is no way to have an island centered with the kitchen. Does the kitchen really need to be centered in the frame opening? Would I go crazy if it wasn’t centered? And can an island be off-centered from the centered kitchen and not drive me crazy? I don’t know if anyone can answer those questions except me, but if you could look at pictures of off-center islands and see if it’s the equivalent of nails on a chalkboard to my symmetry-obsessed brain, that would help tremendously. So if you can find pictures of kitchens with islands that are off-centered from the kitchen wall (and where the kitchen wall is the focal point of the kitchen), that would be a huge help!
I have those and probably many more questions to answer before anything is set in stone. But it sure is fun to start thinking, dreaming and planning this! And of course, I’ll share every detail of every step of the way.
FYI, I had planned to share the second part of the chair upholstery tutorial today because my mom and I worked until 8:00pm last night and finished everything except the trim, nails, and seat cushion. It looks SO GOOD and I can’t wait for you guys to see it!
I knew I had taken a lot of pictures, so I thought it would be good to split them up into two more posts so I wouldn’t overwhelm you with so many pictures in one post, and we ended up last night at a natural stopping point. But when I sat down at my computer this morning and counted the pictures, I realized I had taken seventy-one pictures.
I realized immediately that there was no way I could sort through seventy-one photos, edit them, post them, and write a detailed description of the process before 11:30am, when I have to leave the house. (On Wednesdays, I have lunch with my mom and brother.) So tomorrow I’ll post part two, which shows most of the upholstery process, and then the final post on Friday, which shows the process of trimming the chair, making the cushion, and I’ll show you the finished chair. Guys, it’s so beautiful I almost hate sitting on it!
Addicted 2 Decorating is a place where I share my DIY and decorating experience while remodeling and decorating the 1948 home my husband Matt and I purchased in 2013. Matt has multiple sclerosis and is unable to do physical labor, so I do most of the work around the house alone. You can learn more about me here.
