Dealing With Our Bad Kitchen Floorplan

Our kitchen has the most awkward layout in history.  There is almost no counter space on either side of the stove, the washer and dryer jut out into the MIDDLE of the room, the available counter space is about 6 square feet, and there are TWO dining rooms in this house.  What??

When I first saw our house I knew that the dinette area could lend itself to being part of the entire kitchen.

Recently I went to Lowes and used their free kitchen designers to see what suggestions they had and if they could suggest a better floor plan.

Overall I was not impressed with Lowes design plans for us or the $8,000+ cabinets they tried to sell me.

The one really good suggestion I took away from Lowes was to stack our washer and dryer.  We have newer model LG machines and they are stackable so we wouldn't need to buy new ones, and they would free up a large chunk of space.

I ran with this idea and talked to Brian about the potential of moving the plumbing for the machines a few feet.  I knew this would be major work because our house is on a slab so cement cutting would be involved.

Also, our water heater is in the kitchen along side the pantry.  I was inspired by an Ikea kitchen display I had seen that had an entire wall of cabinets.  I realized we could turn a wall in our kitchen into all cabinets storing the washer and dryer, refrigerator, and a pantry.  This would also require the big task of moving the water heater.  We hated the idea of the water heater being indoors with us anyway.

We had a plan!

Brian was on board with the ideas.  Even though it was going to be a lot of extra work, we both knew it would pay off in the end.

It took us more than five years now to come up with a practical and well improved kitchen floor plan. I couldn't have been any more excited that something finally made sense!

To finalize and make a more accurate visiual of our plans I started playing with Ikea's home designer.  Check out my blog on that here.