laying it out

Anyone who has ever renovated a space in their home will always tell you: 1) it's so much more expensive than I thought it would be and 2) so much more goes into it than I realized.  I'm not here to provide any counterexamples when it comes to renovating our kitchen and guest bath.

From the moment we laid eyes on our lovely bungalow, we knew she was in desperate need of a kitchen and guest bath overhaul.  You may have seen pictures of her kitchen and thought, "Well that's not so bad... sure the terracotta colored tiles are dated and the fridge looks kinda small, but I'm sure they can make good use of it."  And honestly, for 18 months, we made excellent use of it--we cooked up a storm and hosted a few successful shindigs with great friends.  But there were two things that really stuck out to us:

• the extremely noticeable slope in the floor (I'm talking at least 5 inches from peak to valley) indicated that prior renovations had not taken into consideration the impact of added weight on the structure of our home
• having a guest bathroom directly off of the dining room made for some really awkward moments when having friends over for dinner

These two things and a few other smaller issues prompted us to start seriously talking about a kitchen and guest bath renovation.  We spent an unbelievable amount of time throwing ideas back and forth--what part of the renovation are we willing to DIY?  What if we created an eat-in kitchen area with built-in seating in the former breakfast nook?  What about putting a slim island between the dining room and kitchen?  What if we moved the entire kitchen into the breakfast nook?  There were times I was convinced our kitchen was destined to always be awkward and poorly arranged.

Then we had a breakthrough--what if we totally flip-flopped the location of our kitchen and guest bath?  If you imagine that the back part of our house is split into thirds, one third is currently being used for a bathroom, one third has the "meat" of our kitchen, and the remaining one third is a breakfast nook with a bar that we really only use to house a Keurig and some glassware (we would probably use it more if the floor wasn't so insanely unlevel in that area and oh, if we owned breakfast nook furniture).  If we took the breakfast nook third and transformed it into a bathroom (with a door leading directly into the adjacent guest bedroom), we could expand the kitchen into the bathroom third.  The sketch below is a bird's eye view of our kitchen if you were standing at the back of our house looking down on it.

I sincerely apologize for this drawing--I have no "before" sketches of our kitchen layout, so I took one of our proposed sketches and Frankenstein'd this.

We spent another unbelievable amount of time after that talking through how our kitchen would be laid out in its new-ish location.  We put painter's tape to mark where we thought appliances and fixtures would be located.  By the time we met with our contractors (with two previous relationships with contractors not working out for various reason), we pretty much knew what we wanted.  Here's their sketch of how our kitchen and guest bath will be laid out!  (They were able to add in the coat closet in the back!)