Laying it out for you

One of the main reasons I had the confidence to do this remodel is because we are going with Ikea cabinets. Ikea is really diy friendly and their kitchen designer program made it easy for me to design the layout. We also turned to the ikeafans.com forum and got quite a bit of help. I definitely could not have come up with these plans without them. Between those two sources, we ended up feeling like we could get a good usable space even in our small area.
Here is the current kitchen and dining room. Well, our current kitchen doesn’t use ikea cabinets or countertop so this is the closest I could get using the ikea planner but you get the picture – and it isn’t pretty.

Now beauty is as beauty does but its not just aesthetically ugly but practically too. There is very little cabinet or countertop space. The door on the bottom left is the entrance from the garage and the main way we enter the house. Carrying a bunch of grocery bags through the small space between the fridge and oven is not fun. There is no countertop anywhere near the oven which means I often balance a plate of hot pancakes on the little ledge cutout on the yellow wall. And if I want to drain spaghetti, I have to walk across the kitchen, but first I take Lucy into the living room then run back and try to finish before she gets underfoot again – because I care about safety and not dropping boiling water on my small child. So we are pretty much gutting the place. The drywall on the ceiling will remain as will a few electrical outlets and one window. I think that’s it.
My main obstacle during the design process was thinking outside the box which is where ikeafans helped out. My original idea was to do a peninsula but I had several problems.
1) The dishwasher would butt up against the penisula, making it awkward to put away dishes when the dishwasher is open. It would also be squishing our already small dining room more than I wanted to.
2) The window. I really really wanted to keep it. Having a natural light source from two directions was one of the few things I loved about this kitchen and it hurt my heart to think about losing that. But that window does look out onto our garage wall (with about a ~8ft path between) so it wasn’t exactly a pretty view.
Here is the new layout.
 
It solves both problems. We ended up convinced that an island was the way to go. The island will mean a more open flow, but that is okay with Mr. anti-open floor plan Craig because we still have a bit of separation from the living room. The end result will be more of a eat-in kitchen look compared to a formal dining room but with a small casual house like ours, I think it will work well. And I can already imagine little people sitting at the island building volcanos or creating playdough art while I am working away at my own science experiment-y kitchen projects (home fermentation, anyone?)
The window issue was a bit tricker but we got it too. I was getting stuck because the window overlapped the fridge and the new stove location but I couldn’t find another place to put the stove. Turns out, I didn’t need a new place to put the stove, I needed a new place to put the fridge. Moving the fridge to the other side of the dishwasher does mean it encroaches into the dining room a bit more but it is just a fridge and not a whole line of cabinets so it won’t feel as smooshy. And it allows us to move the stove down to be centered over the new, slightly smaller, window. 
I know what you are thinking…a stove in front of a window? Is that to code? In our case yes because the window is going to be a glass block window. No venting issues or trying to work with a downdraft system and we get the light without the ugly view!
Here is a side view.
That is the image I have to force myself to remember when I start hyperventilating. If only remodeling a kitchen in real life was as easy as creating it on the ikea kitchen planner!