Even while we were working on finishing the laundry rooms we are gathering the last of the materials for the another big project : the kitchen. It's hard to get a good feel for our kitchen/dining room without seeing it in person. However, I'll do my best to let you see what we are planning. When we bought the house the kitchen/dining room was accessed from the living room through this arch.
The doorway between the living and dining room was enlarged to 9' and we added stairs to the basement. You can see that the new stairs took up most of the narrow dining room space. Our dining room is now only 3' wide.
The kitchen has not changed much since moving in.
The kitchen has not changed much since moving in.
We bought a fridge and stove but their pretty stainless steel finish doesn't make up for the many, many deficiencies in the kitchen.
Even if we ignored the lack of dining space the kitchen is deeply flawed. The cabinet bases are maple but someone decided they would look better with 1/8" oak veneer glued over the faces. They also replaced the doors and drawer fronts with plywood so we cannot restore the original maple cabinets. The cheap white Formica counters are chipped and always look dirty.
The bedroom behind the kitchen did not have working outlets so we had to drill a hole in the wall to power the modem and wireless router.
The new fridge sticks out into the room because it does not fit under the upper cabinet.
Plus we have a coat closet in the kitchen. The vent pipe for the old water heater and boiler were boxed in at the end of the closet and the electrical panel is in a linen closet at the other end. The whole setup is weird and wastes a lot of space.
I have been enjoying having so many cabinets and a large counter space to work with but it's time to get rid of the current kitchen and start work on something much more practical. As you can see we will lose defined kitchen and dining areas but the new layout will be much roomier and allow access to the basement as well. 
One of the features I like best about the new kitchen is the new doorway out the back of the house. We have a large patio out back that can only be accessed by going out the side door and around the house. The patio doors will replace the window over the sink.
We spent the weekend ripping out most of the kitchen. I still have more demo to do but I should have some pictures soon.
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