What would you do? House design dreams

[cville]

Sept 11, 2024 11:10:44 GMT -5 mccallister84 said:

Sept 11, 2024 10:20:41 GMT -5 cville said:

Seeing the pictures, I think a peninsula will feel cramped. And doesn't solve your stove in the corner problems.

Go big or go home. Knock down that wall.

Yea the peninsula 100% does not work without moving the door down which is also a big project.

Even with the door moved.

[rubytue]

Now that I see the picture, ignore everything I said previously. That wall is most likely not a huge issue. I has thought it was the wall between the living room and dining room.

[mcsangel2]

I'm an outlier. I'd do 2. You don't have to use the dining room as a DR, but as a separate room you have options. It could be a second office or a playroom or a music room or a place to pen up a dog...I wouldn't give up that flexibility with the space and I think it's better for resale too.

[mccallister84]

Sept 11, 2024 14:40:07 GMT -5 rubytue said:

Now that I see the picture, ignore everything I said previously. That wall is most likely not a huge issue. I has thought it was the wall between the living room and dining room.

Haha I am definitely not an engineer and like I said previously we are very much in the beginning just dreaming stages of this but as I was looking at it I was like I would be very surprised to find that this wall matters much (also I doubt my neighbors would have done it since they moved so quickly afterwards if it was $$$$$& to remove the wall).

[mccallister84]

Sept 11, 2024 14:41:49 GMT -5 mcsangel2 said:

I'm an outlier. I'd do 2. You don't have to use the dining room as a DR, but as a separate room you have options. It could be a second office or a playroom or a music room or a place to pen up a dog...I wouldn't give up that flexibility with the space and I think it's better for resale too.

Resale has always been my concern but by the time we move the house will be paid off and it will be 10 plus years since we’ve done this. I appreciate everyone’s thoughts but we are leaning even more strongly towards 1 now. I think 1 allows us to get almost everything we want in a kitchen while we will always feel a little meh about two.

Our neighbors bought their house after the old owners did 1 and I did ask if it made her think twice about it and she said it was 100% not on their radar. Obviously that will not be true for everyone but I think we are very much leaning towards fuck it let’s enjoy the house we own and deal with selling it down the road.

[CrazyLucky]

Your house sounds exactly like my house. We are just finishing a kitchen renovation. What we did was remove the wall between the dining room and kitchen. Then we extended the kitchen a few feet into where the formal dining room was. We couldn't extend the kitchen much more because of the placement of some windows in the dining room. The formal living room will be gone. The dining room will be larger. We're having a chest built to go in front of the windows in the former formal living room that will hopefully be a place where the kids can put all their crap when they come home so it's kind of hidden. So the first floor was formal living room, formal dining room, kitchen, family room. Now it will just be formal dining room, kitchen, family room.

We also put a large island in the kitchen. We had a pub table where you are describing the table you're not sure what to do with. The island doesn't take all the space where the pub table was, but it does extend into it. We're not planning to put anything in that space, at least until we are living with it for a while to see what we need. The pub table is gone.

For us, that wall we removed was a load bearing wall, which led to some complications. Just an FYI.

[nicolewi]

I vote number one, and think about how you can use the entire space. Just because it’s technically a kitchen doesn’t mean it really all has to be kitchen? Like, maybe you can incorporate some storage built-ins near the door, a large island that can double as a homework space, that kind of thing.

[sent]

I did #1 with knocking down the wall between the dining room and kitchen. We didn't move the dining table into the living room though and just kept it where it was in the previous dining room space. So we have no island. I use one half of the living room as my office space. The other half (the part open to the dining room) is where the kids watch TV when their dad is occupying the family room TV with sports. Sometimes the kids sit at the dining room table for dinner and watch the living room TV from there during dinner. Overall it's been a good improvement compared to before. We also put in a wall of cabinets in the far wall of the former dining room space and put a countertop in the middle of it. We use that to set up the dinner buffet when we have people over.

Our previous kitchen had a peninsula opposite from the wall with the oven in your picture. We don't miss it. But we also have a step down into our family room so there is a wall there. We opened that wall into a half wall (turns out it was always a half wall and someone had closed it up before us) and put a countertop on the half wall with some stools. So that substitutes for what the peninsula used to do. Sometimes the kids eat breakfast there. Or sometimes we set up appetizer items into a buffet there to eat it in the family room when friends or grandparents come over.

[jordanbaker]

We had a similar layout and just finished a complete renovation of our first floor. We took that wall down and extended the kitchen with a big island near where the wall used to be as well as a dining table nearer our family room. We eliminated having a formal dining room. Our front room is more formal than our living room, but it’s been more of an adult hang out than the off limits fancy furniture of the formal living room of my childhood home (also the same layout). Our house is so much more functional now than it was before.

[fryjack2]

Sept 10, 2024 18:43:09 GMT -5 circa1978 said:

I will never, ever knock down another wall. I'm sure people have easy peasy experiences with it but it has been a PITA both times we've done it.

Can you share more about why it was a PITA?  

We are about to start a project that includes knocking down a load bearing wall between the kitchen and loving/dining room combo space.  A bit nervous, but hoping its not too big of a deal to do that. 

[circa1978]

fryjack2, The last time, we took out a huge pantry as part of an unplanned kitchen remodel after a flood. Mostly, it added a ton to our electrical costs, but first, we had to go all around the mulberry bush to see if it was load-bearing (it was not, but this required many consultants and trips into our attic and basements and the exterior of the house and took a lot of time in a project that ended up taking almost two years). The wall we took down had several outlets plus a water line (that then needed to be moved to a different wall across the kitchen because - no fault of taking out the wall - they freaking measured the length of the new wall wrong when they ordered or cabinets and we had to move our appliances around at the last minute). Then the ceiling in the kitchen had can lights that were in weird places once the wall was down (and, of course, the lighting for the pantry itself was in a weird spot). All that required extensive work on the ceiling in that entire area and reworking all the electrical. Naturally, there was then no electrical at all on the next available wall, which had been the back of the previous pantry, so it all had to be run there. After a certain point, I asked my husband to stop telling me what things were costing, but I know that the electrical was one of the single biggest line items in what was a hugely expensive project, and if we'd just left everything where it was, it would have been a lot easier. If the wall had turned out to be load-bearing, I probably just would have collapsed into a puddle. Your mileage may vary.

The first wall was in a bathroom and seemed straightforward, but it resulted in big plumbing bills because I thought making a shower bigger was a lot more straightforward than it was. Essentially, the builder had put in a sort of 3x4 box in the bathroom with the toilet on one side, setting it back from the shower, and then we had a small walk in shower in front of the box, with a sunken tub on the other side. I was like, hey, let's take down those walls and have a bigger shower. Chaos ensued. This all *might* have been kicked off by my brother and I knocking on the walls to discover there was that empty space and going up in the attic while DH was out of town and then starting the demo with a sledgehammer ourselves. 😳

[eb777888]

I'd knock down the wall.

[lostrn]

We knocked down a wall, well 2 walls actually, to open up our entire first floor. We knew we'd have to rerun plumbing, but when we opened it up that's where our HVAC duct work was. So at first it was a bit of an OMG moment because the estimate for the additional cost to move that was crazy. Then the owner of the remodeling company stopped by the project and was like no, we have to move it, we can't redo a wall here, it will look terrible and he cut the estimate way down to make it more palatable.

It wasn't a fun time but we love the end results. We have a lot more light and it feels like a lot more room. The only thing I don't like is if I'm doing noisy stuff in the kitchen when my family is trying to watch TV, it can be frustrating for all of us.