Designing A New Kitchen and Dining Room

Our current kitchen is not fit for purpose. Okay, so it has an oven, it has a few cupboards and it even has more work surface than the far larger kitchen in our old house but it doesn't have other important things.

Things like ventilation to take steam away (the old vent has been covered by plasterboard), a kitchen door to stop the fire alarms going off every time the oven is opened, space for the fridge or space to store food. In fact, the fridge and the food are all in the conservatory; along with the washer and dryer! 

And don't get me started on the far corner of the room, which has gone beyond damp and is making its merry way to sodden.  

Something needs to be done!

What are the options? Well we could move the kitchen into the conservatory but it's a 30 year old conservatory, is literally falling away from the wall and has negligible thermal insulation properties. We could move the kitchen into the dining room, but that reduces the amount of living space.

 

So, continuing the theme of "go big or go home" that seems to have plagued our endeavours, we're going to get rid of the conservatory and build an extension that will house a shiny new kitchen and a new dining room. 

Where to begin?

All good projects need a design brief. Tracy provided ours, specifying how the space needed to be used:

1. A person should be able to face guests while cooking
   
2. Dining table that can seat 12
3. Two ovens 
4. Large hob
5. Large fridge-freezer (supplemented by a chest freezer)
   

Straight away we can draw a couple of conclusions:

Point number one means that there needs to be an island worktop, or equivalent, in the room so that someone using the cooker isn't facing the wall. 

Point number 2 is also clearly going to have a big impact on the required size of the new living space.

First Draft

First kitchen layout - with on side of the dining table poking through the wall!

From the brief, we went through a few layouts and agreed on the above. There is a cooking zone and a dining zone, with some ideal placements of features. This was all done without measuring or anything so what we needed next was to do a bit of research and work out what it would look like in reality.

Research

Sizes of kitchen units? Fairly standard. Heights of counter tops? Fairly standard. Sizes of appliances? Fairly standard. Have you ever tried to figure out how much space a table needs though? Sure, you can find the size of the table and the size of the chairs, but what is a sensible distance to leave around the chairs? How much room do people take up when seated? I ended up on a voyage through design philosophy trying to figure this lot out! 

The rule of thumb shown here allows a certain amount of space around each person for elbow room, it allows space for plates and it allows space to access chairs.

When we followed these rules, the dining zone ended up going out by almost 6 metres and extending across the property boundary and into next door's property! I didn't think they'd be happy to agree to that so some innovation was called for.

What if we remove the space to circulate around the back of the seating? Okay, so there could end up being a lot of bum-shuffling but we're not planning on hosting any fine dining experiences, this is for friends and family. 

We don't need gargantuan amounts of space on the table for serving dishes either. This isn't a banqueting suite, no matter how much I would love to build a medieval great hall! So we can make the table narrower, pinch a little elbow room and all of a sudden, the table actually fits within our own property's boundary!

Second Draft

This is the design we settled on. You can see that we had to make several compromises due to lack of space and to keep the budget under control.

We used a figure of £1,250 per square metre of floorspace to estimate construction costs and did an online shopping trip to get prices for all the furniture, fixtures and fittings. 

Now it's time to proceed to the next stage. This is calling in an architect, getting surveys done and making all the necessary applications. More on this next time!