Designing My Kitchen – Wanna Help?

The pace is picking up once again on our building work, with the laundry now demolished and the last of the verandah work commencing in preparation for re-roofing the ‘old house,’ it’s time to make several major decisions. Such as Designing our Kitchen. Building is like that, there is always a flow on effect, one job leads to another, one decision means several others now have to be made.

Once the verandah is completed, load bearing posts will be erected in preparation for the roof trusses. As the ‘old house’ walls are lower than the ‘new house’ we need to ‘build up’ the walls, while doing that we will replace old windows with new, thus we now need to make decisions regards the layout of the ‘old house.’ Once the new trusses and iron are on, none of the internal walls will be load bearing, essentially this means if we so desired we could gut the entire ‘old house’, rather exciting, yet it means it’s crunch time decision time.

Our plans include enlarging the study, opening the library entrance and moving the ‘position’ of the learning room, we’ll also add a huge window, translating to more light and warmth.
I now have to design my kitchen and I’d love your assistance!

Already we are making a major ‘modification’ to our original plans, ones that have been submitted and approved. A benefit of living in an incomplete house is you sometimes realise what looked feasible on paper doesn’t work in reality.  Our error is our dining room is too small for our family size. Since we first planned our dining room we have welcomed new children and we’ve begun to experience the impact of grown children on our seating arrangements. Although our grown children have left home, they return for week long visits, when that occurs we need to butt two tables together, when our daughter moved home we added half a table permanently. Our foreseeable future includes further children leaving home, yet then returning with girlfriends and boyfriends, future spouses and grandchildren,  our needs will only continue to be ever changing, our priority is to provide a space that can be adaptable to the moment.  Fortunately we can ‘grow’ our dining room by encroaching on our planned kitchen area.  After adjusting my vision I realised I can still have a large kitchen if I move it ‘sideways’ though this means decreasing the size of our learning area, upon reflection I realised this would be okay, though I remain a tad concerned regards potential lack of windows.

The picture above shows you the current dining and potential kitchen area. The dining in the foreground will stay but continues till a little past the ‘bend in the wall.’ The kitchen will then begin and continue through to the ‘chair in the distance. The study is beyond the open door in the far distance, it will come out to the chair. The pool table sits where the bench will go and there will be an open passage way between the bench and the glass doors. The wall beyond the pool table with the corkboard and blacking currently attached will be removed so the kitchen and walkway can continue through.

Last year Anna Maria (then 21) and Einstein (then 17) catered for 35 people at our annual homeschool camp.  After working in their industrial kitchen Anna Maria was keen for us to adapt several ideas into our plans, features that would make cooking for a large family easier, these are included in the list below.  PC has been toying with the idea of building the cabinets himself, I have every faith he is capable, however we’re thinking the Bunning’s flat packs will be an affordable possibility.

I’d love your assistance with designing my kitchen to meet the needs of a large, ever expanding family. The kitchen space is 7m by 3m (24ft by 9ft10),  I may decrease the length and  increase the width a little.

Thus far I have on my wish list:

• A Deep Sink with possibly a second sink on the opposite bench
• Flexible Swivel Sprayer Tap
• Hot Plate – laid into the bench next to the stove top
• Walk in Pantry
• An Island Bench (I’m not sold on that yet as I don’t think the space warrants it)
• Plenty of Drawers – maybe all drawers?
• One Bench on Industrial Wheels – planning to move the bench against the wall when large crowds visit, making the dining room larger and using the bench as a servery.