Flipping the Farmhouse layout

Let's talk farmhouse layout!

One of my very favorite things to do in interior design is to design interior layouts. I could and do spend hours making major and subtle changes to layouts. One of our projects is an apartment renovation that started with me moving windows and completely changing the layout and ending up with a similar layout that was already there. Sometimes I just have to see all the possibilities to narrow it down 😂

On the previous post, you can see that we are going with an a simple paint and flooring change in this house, but it escalated quickly.

One of the challenging things in renovation is trying to make older homes fit the way we live our lives now. This isn't an especially old home, although someone did point out that it was 50 years old and I had to do some math to find out they were indeed correct. I'm that age when I think of a 1970s home as being only 30 years old 😂

Here you can see the original layout...

This wasn't a perfect layout, just a quick sketch in Chief Architect. There are no closets in the two rooms, because at the time of this model, we were not planning on touching those spaces. Sometimes when I model the ideas are flowing so hard, I skip over some spots and come back to them later.

The living room is a nice space and the two bedrooms are also fairly large with a nice big bathroom between them. The pain points for us was the lack of a third bedroom on the main floor and the size of the kitchen/dining room area. The ages and needs of our children demanded that we have at least two bedrooms upstairs for the kids and a master to be near by.

The kitchen was small, no dishwasher and just really cramped for our large family. Walking into the kitchen from the garage, you immediately bump into the fridge. Small sink, mostly cabinet doors instead of drawers and a soffit that was taking up too much upper cabinet space. All very typical of the era of this house and a kitchen that I'm sure worked really well for the family who lived here before.

Unfortunately, there was water damage and probable mold beneath the sink and the cabinets had really seen better days. The lack of a dishwasher was also a hard stop for me. I've lived without a dishwasher before and if I'm given a choice, I will always choose to have a dishwasher. With five kids in the house, that dishwasher is going at LEAST twice a day just to keep up.

When I'm designing a whole home remodel like this one, I always start with the kitchen. The kitchen truly is the heart of the home and one we expect to work very hard for us in our modern era. We want kitchens to be a place to cook AND a place to gather. No longer is the kitchen relegated to the back of the house for the servants.

The kitchen can also set the direction and tone for the whole house design. Will the kitchen be modern or farmhouse? Will we do wood cabinets and trim or painted? Will the cabinets be plain or intricate? These are all questions I ask myself when doing a whole house design plan.

Here you can see some very cluttery pictures of the old kitchen cabinets. We had already started bringing stuff in before I could get some clean pictures.

I really tried to make this space work...I actually came up with two different layouts that I thought could work. One in which the appliances stayed mostly the same with the addition of taking over that door and adding a door in the mudroom. In the other layout, I flipped where the fridge was making a mini wall between the kitchen and dining room. That one was actually my favorite, but it was VERY controversial 😂

Image by the Cabinet Joint

This is a nice layout...I did have to take away some the peninsula to get that dishwasher in there, but it allowed for a nice countertop cabinet that would have had some glass in it. This is an okay layout, but I just really wanted more.

After going back to the drawing board, I sent over my drawings to the Cabinet Joint and this is what they came back with.

Image by the Cabinet Joint

Image by the Cabinet Joint

Image by the Cabinet Joint

What a great stove wall this one has! Oh, I just loved this stove wall so much...there was going to be an open bookshelf on the right hand side for all my cookbooks, plus a space below for appliances. I just loved how balanced and symmetrical this one was and we got the dishwasher in!

Downsides are that the dishwasher is in the corner, which is not ideal. You really want at least 21" between the corner and the dishwasher so someone can stand on both sides and unload. Plus, there will be cabinets that will be blocked when the dishwasher was opened. Sometimes that can't be helped in these old small kitchen when you are trying to retrofit a dishwasher into a space that has never had one.

The glaring issue with this kitchen is the fridge wall...you either love it or hate it! We were actually going to recess this fridge in so that although it's a normal depth fridge, it would have felt like a cabinet depth fridge. That corner was going to be for snacks and this would have been the food zone.

In reality, building that wall there really cut off the kitchen from the dining room. I'm actually okay with a little separation between rooms and I prefer that instead of everything being really open concept. I wanted to love this kitchen layout so bad and thought this was the one, but I couldn't ever pull the trigger on it.

After getting a second opinion from a certified kitchen designer, Susan Serra, I nixed this one. She gave me all sorts of wonderful options, but this space was not going to work for me.

When my brain is stuck on a design problem, that's all it can think about. I went back to the drawing board so many times, but it just wasn't going to work.

One morning, I had an attack of insomnia and couldn't go back to sleep at 0200. This kitchen was driving me nuts. I played with it and played with it and then inspiration struck! Why don't we completely flip this house around and put the kitchen in the back, which would make a really amazing flow from kitchen to backyard?

Oh, my little fingers moved as fast as they could in Sketchup and I came up with something that I thought really worked! Stay tuned for that new layout, it's a good one!