The thing I love most about looking at remodels is trying to understand why people put expensive materials into crazy layouts. It mostly feels terrible to rip it up. Except in this situation it actually felt pretty great, because this kitchen was terrible.
The layout was bad and besides being dysfunctional, cabinets and appliances simply didn't work. After some scheming, we came up with this:
We moved the sink to underneath the new and enlarged window, and added a wall of deep pantry storage to surround the new fridge location. We knew that re-orienting the island would help traffic flow, and after we changed flooring for a consistent material the small footprint felt much larger.
The other half of the space housed the dining room, the built-ins afforded some desperately needed storage, but actually made the already cramped space feel small and dark.
When we removed the dining room built-ins we discovered the house was originally framed to have a dining room window, which was lucky since we had already purchased a window to give us an amazing view of the rimrock, create some symmetry, and make the space bright and airy.
We tried to buy as much kitchen room as possible by creating banquette seating under the dining windows so that the table could be shifted as close as possible to the wall. This created storage and helped give us as much counter and island space as possible.
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