House Plans

Our kitchen is rather small. 3650 x 2860 or thereabouts. There’s also not much in it that we can keep, see Tanya’s blog for pictures.

Firstly, we decided to move the door(way). That opens the kitchen up, or splits it down the middle, depending on how you look at it. The opening can’t be too far to the left, because the electrical distribution box (DB) and prepaid electricity meter is there. Also, it gets too close to the semi-private area. And it can’t go too far to the right, since that infringes on my (I’m the cook in the family) work space.

Currently I’m thinking that either the fridge or the oven should go in the corner. I’m also thinking I can steal some space by using the hole in the wall where the door currently is. Putting the fridge way over there splits the work triangle, but keeps the kids out of my hair when they do the “let’s stare at the inside of the fridge” thing. Putting the oven in the corner means that the fridge has to go somewhere else, which in turn means that the new door will probably move to the left, which takes it further away from the living room on the right.

Ommmmmmmmmmm…..

So there we were, sitting, talking, drinking red wine (this is the planning stage, see?)… and we talked about which way the bathroom door should swing. And a few minutes later we’d moved the kitchen door.

OK, to understand all of this you would need to look at the rough floor plan. See that area labelled “Hall”? It’s semi-private space — between the bedrooms and the communal bathroom. But the kitchen also opens up into it. So what happens when you have a party? I don’t know about you, but our friends hang out in the kitchen. And that makes the “hall” public. Not good for the kids who maybe want to withdraw from the party.

So, we decided to close the existing kitchen door, and to relocate the doorway to the wall between the “entrance” and the kitchen. I’ll then build a cupboard or something into the dead corner — unused space has always bothered me, and in this house design, the “hall” area is not used for anything more than a glorified passage. A good house design doesn’t have passages :-)