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Renovating Design Dilemma Kitchens

Floorplan puzzle help please :)

last year

Hello all,

I'm looking for advice and ideas on opening out our current floor plan to better use as a family living space.

The home has had two separate extensions before we bought, and as a result it feels very much like a rabbit warren downstairs. We have lots of space, however, it all feels rather disjointed.

I've attached a few (rather basic!) drawings of the current layout. Our initial plan when moving in was to extend (shown in the Phase Two drawing) but that will be at least 5-10 years off before we have the funds. The doors are highlighted in blue on the plans.

In the meantime, we really want to make the space work for us better. We're looking at taking down the wall between the kitchen and dining room, and also adding doors into the living room. Hopefully this should open up the space.

I think we may have two options, shown in the drawings phase one A and phase one B, to either lose the walls completely to the hallway, or rather keep a section of the wall - but would this look strange just ending at some point?

Any advice, inspiration and ideas are so very welcome, both on these plans, or something completely out of the box that would work better! Budget as always will be a concern so any quick wins too.

Thank you so much!

Rebekah

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Comments (4)

CWD
last year
I would do Option A but keep the door going into the kitchen, rather than having it as just an opening. Better for keeping smells and heat in the open plan space and also better for preventing a fire spreading. You might want to add patio doors or a large window from the kitchen onto the space outside the dining room doors/window which will also help to make it feel more open/light. You might not need to extend in the future...
Rebekah B thanked CWD
katlucy
last year
Can you give some more detail? orientation? I‘m wondering why you the office and utllity are not being considered as the kitchen living area…
Rebekah B thanked katlucy
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Jonathan
last year
I’m with Katlucy. I think you should expand your living space along the back and find somewhere else for a work from home space.
Rebekah B thanked Jonathan
Rebekah B
Original Author
last year
Thank you all for your comments and insights!

Just to provide some more information:
- @CWD - Thank you for your thoughts. I've created the kitchen opening to provide line of sight to the garden as you walk in the front door (on the back wall of the kitchen is a large window), but I imagine I may get the same result with single/double glass doors perhaps? I love your idea about the patio doors, we already have bi-folds along the dining room out to the garden (shown as a blue line) so that would be lovely :-).
- @katlucy and @Jonathan - thank you for your ideas. I agree, removing those walls and opening up the office/utility to be part of the main living space sounds like a great solution! Originally we discounted removing the wall between the kitchen and corridor by the utility as it currently has a removed chimney stack resting on the wall above. This would require removing the stack from the first floor all the way up to the roof. I'm wondering though, instead of extending out, we put funds into that instead. Certainly food for thought!
- @Oraanj Interior Design Team - thank you for your insights, I love the idea of creating a design feature for the wall rather than removing completely. Our thinking behind opening up the walls completely was that the hallway has no windows and so is very dark. Thanks so much.

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