It’s never too early to plan a kitchen

Well, it’s been a while! Instead of catching you up on how the last few years have been, I’m just going to get to the fun stuff. Even though we’re probably 2 years away from doing anything with this.

My first thought about the kitchen was that after going from 90 square feet of kitchen to about 200 (plus a butler’s pantry), we’d have luxurious amounts of space. It doesn’t work out that way though. That 90-square-foot room we had at the old house was featureless and I could bend it to my will. Here we have beautiful old windows, heavy stone exterior walls, radiators, a wall of original cabinets, and doors into the room in three corners. We’ve made the original cabinet more useful by adding twice as many shelves and replacing the very rough drawer boxes.

We also got a proper pantry closet just outside the kitchen by borrowing space from the back of a very deep closet in the dining room. Should we set a goal to have moldings on this door before the pantry is 3 years old?

Unfortunately, whoever last renovated this kitchen did not make the best of this difficult room. There was supposed to be a table in the middle of the room but that makes it really tight.

We put the table against the wall away from everything else, which crowds the entrances to the room and leaves a lot of wasted space in the middle. Not ideal but we’re making it work.

The fridge and stove can’t really go anywhere else, and we’re happy with the microwave where we put it. But we want to add cabinets around the microwave and fridge and above the stove. The cabinet on the chimney bump will go away because it crowds that little bit of work space.

The sink wall is the worst part. Counter space is minimal and yet the sink is super far away. Also, it’s not worth even trying to clean the back door because without fail it’s covered in water spots the next day.

The plan is to turn the sink and make it a peninsula. Drawing this up to scale (although a bit crudely) isn’t doing the best things for my patience.

Things to like about this: we basically get a tight little galley layout that (aside from the refrigerator) is not in the path of the back door. This will save steps compared to how things are now while also giving us more work space. People who are not cooking will be able to sit and chat out of the way. The breakfast bar will work way better than a regular table for chopping vegetables. And the sink will have a view out the window to the side instead of facing a wall.

The downsides: a 30-inch refrigerator and a small countertop microwave are the only things that will ever fit. We are always draining dishes on the countertop and now the rack will be very prominently in the middle of the room. I also don’t know if we can get the trash under the sink but I’m sick of it being across the room from where I chop vegetables. Space around the oven is less than some people would like, and I’m just crossing my fingers that we can get enough heat into the room when the radiator next to it goes bye bye. And the window next to the stove, we’ll forever wish it were about 8 inches to the right.

Anyways, tell me what you think! I’ve been thinking about some of the nitty gritty details but we’ll talk about those (and the aesthetic ideas that readers will actually care about) later.