The wall between the kitchen and the unused "breakfast" room is gonna go. The idea is to get more space, make the kitchen more of a modern entertainment area and create a better bond with the back room.

From this:

We hope to get something like this:

Thing is, there are air conditioning ducts inside that wall. It should be an expensiveinteresting project rerouting those.

The front-wall peninsula idea came about one evening as we were trying to figure out what to do with the "dinky" cooktop island from one of the early designs. The best real-world way to judge the impact of a new floorplan is to lay out masking tape on the floor where the new countertops will be.

We'd go from the tape on the floor here:

To this.
If we pursue that design. Walking around the masking tape it feels fine - not too cramped entering the kitchen from the dining room.

But when it comes to flow, this works better. Drawback: The cooktop peninsula is attached to the bathroom. We're having a little trouble getting past that.

We've been working since early January with a designer to lay out the new floorplan and position the appliances to create a useful "working triangle" between stove, refrigerator and sink. We're taking down one wall to pull in a little interior room that's not really used right now... with the extra room we thought we'd be able to lay out any floorplan we'd like but it's not that simple. The legs of that triangle can only be so long (don't want more than four feet or so to carry a pot of hot pasta from the stove to the sink), but we still need enough room for people to move around. Then there's maintaining the "flow" from the dining room to the back room.

It's been a tough process, but our designer has some 3-D software that's helping out a lot. We got the latest drafts yesterday. Starting with this (the wall behind the fridge will disappear and the fridge move to the right of the picture)

We modified the original peninsula draft by hand

and saw this:

We also tried to merge the wee cooktop island idea into a peninsula from the other wall

Getting this:

We're getting closer. I don't know what we'd do without this software - I have a hard time visualizing this in my head, and we have enough to worry about just looking at all the design magazines.

This is a map of our weekend itinerary. We hit most of the supply places, and came out just a little less confused than we were setting out. Details to follow.

Here's what we have:


Here's an early design of what we're aiming for:

Here's what I'll be posting a lot: