To consider opening my kitchen up to the dining room

[Dylaninthemovies1]

We have a bit of a fixer upper house. Finally have renovated the living room and playroom, but next on the list is the dining room.

It’s currently a separate room to the kitchen (both decent sized), but with a door between them.

I’m swithering as to whether we should keep the dining room separate or open it up to the kitchen. Opening it up to the kitchen will be expensive and I’m not sure if I could face all the work. Both rooms as very dated, so if we knock them through it would mean both rooms would need refurbished, so looking at up to £30k rather than just £1k to decorate the dining room just now, and another £20k ish in the future to do the kitchen up.

So, can I be cheeky and ask your thoughts on open plan kitchen dining; do you prefer this, or do you prefer a separate dining room.

Yanbu: open the two rooms up into one
YABU: keep them separate

@Aroundtheworldin80moves

Our last house had a kitchen diner. I hated it. Could see all the cooking mess while trying to eat, plus the incessant noise of the extractor fan. (I have a hatred of repetitive noises like that). And the cooking smells.

Got a separate dining room now. Mostly dining room, but a third is our bar area. It's got an old fashioned serving hatch between the two. It's mostly been used as a home learning area the last few months.

We like having seperate rooms to retreat to for peace and quiet.

We have a serving hatch too. My husband thought it was terribly old fashioned when we bought the house, but it has been so useful, even he wanted to keep it now we are getting the kitchen redone

Why is cooking mess an issue? I clear up as I go along. Everything’s in the dishwasher when I finish cooking. I thought everyone did this ...

I vote you knock them through and make the most of the space. Especially as you have a separate lounge and playroom

Thanks for the Wren kitchen tip. We are hopefully doing a kitchen refurb later this year and it’s something we have never done before. Keen to avoid the kitchen cowboys and ripoff merchants!

I’m Swedish and a big kitchen with room for a big table to eat is absolutely the norm here. Even formally - since we don’t aspire to grandeur ;). If people have formal dining tables they are often in the living room (which tends to be larger than in the UK I think).

Sadly our open plan revolution has meant that living room/lounge and kitchen has become one space which is useless imo. You’re listening to the dishwasher or the Kitchenaid while trying to watch TV. And watching the kitchen mess from your sofa. What is the point of that?

In other words I like a separate kitchen to the sofa area, but I think what way to go about it is more about lifestyle etc.

@WhatKatyDidNxt, check out the Property and DIY board. There’s a wealth of expertise on kitchens there, from tiny gallery ones to enormous high spec spaces.

I’d open it up. It had been done in our house before we bought it and it was a big reason we bought the house. I love it.

I'd put double doors in so you have the best of both worlds

I would opt for the doors in the middle. MIL used to have a similar set up in her old house. She decided to remove the doors and go fully open plan, but found it was really difficult to keep the heat in so ended up using the dining room less.

Alsohuman

Why is cooking mess an issue? I clear up as I go along. Everything’s in the dishwasher when I finish cooking. I thought everyone did this ...

Exactly this!

Kitchen diners are great and very different to an open plan downstairs. I think people get confused and imagine the whole downstairs is open.

I love kitchen diners, and a whole room dedicated just to eating in always seems like a waste to me. And I like to be able to chat to people while I'm cooking, not stuck in the kitchen on my own, missing out on the fun.

I clear as I go and load the diswasher as I cook, so not a lot of mess for people to see. And I'd make sure I had the hob on an external wall so the cooker hood vents directly to an outside wall, they're much more effective at dispersing smells.

I also think you'd be able to do it for a lot less than £20k. A small kitchen at £5k doesn't mean that one 3 times the size is 3 x the price, because the expensive items (appliances, sinks, taps - the price of nice taps is absurd!) are common to both. Most of the extra stuff is simple cabinetry, so not that expensive.

My builder/property developer BIL recommends getting a couple of companies to do plans, then get a decent builder to source the units and fit it (yes, I know, he would, wouldn't he? lol). He recently did a kitchen that a kitchen company had quoted £17k for and it came in at under £10k, including flooring not included in the original quote. He shopped around for units, the identical ones were on offer somewhere and came in, with trade discount, for less than a third of the price the customer was quoted.

His own kitchen, essentially a 5m square with a peninsula unit where the 4th wall would be, and dining/living area beyond that, would have been £8k if he'd charged for his labour and it's fab. Admitttedly, he had a right result with 2 AEG ovens that were on offer and saved him £800, and he was starting from an empty space, so no labour involved in ripping out.

It would add value to your house to open it up. Re the costs, I was quoted £3000 6 years ago to just knock down a 3 metre wall. I think £25k to £30k is a good estimate for the whole thing. I couldn't afford it.
Personally I prefer separate rooms. Once your children are teens, and if they still live at home in their 20s, you really need separate rooms. In the current climate of wfh for adults and kids, it's much easier.
It should only cost a few hundred to decorate your dining room now until you can afford to replace the kitchen.

I have a large kitchen diner and seperate dining and sitting rooms. Only use the dining room at Christmas. If you have a utility room for laundry, overflow fridge and spare storage then open plan kitchen dining is ideal imo. My parents opened up their kitchen and dining room in the era of formal dinner parties, they had bespoke foldaway doors made so the rooms could be divided again easily.

@Chocolatepeanuts

My aunt has a similar floor plan to your kitche/dining room. The only difference is rather than the adjoining door to the side she has a set of double doors in the centre of the wall. Any time i visit the doors are open wide against the wall and it feels open plan as the opening is so large. The light flows through both rooms. But she can also close the doors over to separate the rooms. At times she has used the dining room as a family room and had a snall table in the centre of the kitchen, but at the moment she has the dining room as a dining room. Both have been lovely and funtional and airy.

This is what I was going to suggest, you get the best of both worlds. It's a really flexible option. You do lose a section of wall that you can put cupboards on, but your kitchen is large enough to accommodate ample cupboards and you have a utility already ()

Friends of ours had fold away doors in the middle so they closed them in the evening when they weren’t in the kitchen.

I like a big space, I don’t want to be on my own cooking whilst everyone else is in another room. At Christmas it’s lovely because we’re all together, drinking, cooking, talking whilst the DC play, in the same space. I also tidy as I cook so it’s never a mess. DH is very messy though! Which is fine as long as he clears it up!

Slide into the wall door could work. It's in a pocket inside of the wall so no issue with furniture etc around

Yes- I thing you should do it. We went from a small kitchen and dark, unused dining room to a light, family space where we can chat whilst one person gets on with cooking or jobs. Much more practical. We don't have formal dinner parties. Our dining room just ended up being a dumping ground before we knocked through.

@brimfullofasha another great user name! Looks like the 90s kids are out in force today!
Unfortunately our dining room really is a dumping ground right now. DH has been working in it during lockdown, he used it to build Lego, and for ironing. But it’s really not pretty so we don’t actually eat in it often

I'd go for a knock through every time, I love ours now. With your layout, given you've got 2 other rooms I'd go for one kitchen diner, the playroom will change function as the kids age and can even become a dining room if you'd like when they leave the house.

We did a few things that make our kitchen diner space liveable, which meant we ended up spending more, but makes the space works for us. The stove on the exterior wall mentioned above, so you can vent to the outside, is a must. Also check the exhaust rate of the extractor fan, they vary, we got one that feels as if it sucks the air right out of the room when on high! This means it's never on full and this is excellent for noise. Our neighbours know we're having curry for dinner, but you can't smell it in the house :)
We got two dishwashers, one clean one dirty for normal use, but both can be on if we've got people over, so there's no mess hanging about. I hate the mess too.
We checked how loud all the appliances are, there's a decibel value on them all. The quieter ones tend to be more expensive, but was worth every penny imho. Our dishwashers are so quiet you have to check if the lights on, to know it's on :)

Looking at your drawing, I'd definitely open it up into one big space. Your playroom is isolated from your kitchen so the adults ant engage with the child if cooking. My layout is much smaller than yours, asnim in a mid terrace so all the rooms are in one line. We have a separate lounge which is cosy, and then a kitchen diner although we don't currently have a big dining table 🤣. It'll cost you maybe 2k to remove the wall and you could put patio or bifold doors at one end of the garden facing wall. We have a u shaped kitchen with a peninsular in the middle with an induction hob on it - when I'm cooking I don't have my back to everyone. A decent extractor will sort out cooking smells. We priced up kitchens from Wren, Howdens, a small independent place and B&Q, and went for B&Q in the end. The carcasses are all the same, in fact our joiner used to work for Wren and told us most carcasses are made by the same company! We had a builder to do all the structural, electrics and plumbing plus fitting the kitchen. They custom fitted it into some odd sized corners and built in the free standing appliances. I've had a few kitchens fitted over the years, and I'd say go for mid price range because when you do get fed up of it you're not as loath to replace it!
Once you've got the basic structure completed you can decide what to do with the non kitchen end.

If you took down the wall, how much cupboard space would you lose? Or wall space for cabinets and the like.

We've got an open plan home and we've lost a lot of space where you could put units etc.

But, I love a kitchen diner, I won't ever have them separate again. When I'm cooking it's so much more sociable, and so easy to grab stuff for the table. We eat at the table for all meals with the children.

Wren left us 7 weeks without a kitchen, they ripped the old one out then messed up the order, granite worktop wrongly measured, units wrongly measured, we didn’t even have a tap to use, then when fitted I had get them back many times to fix stuff.

If you look at Facebook there are groups called things like “Wren kitchen disasters” “we hate wren kitchens” etc

Definitely worth it. When are in a doer upper (against my better judgement) and DH is DIYing it so the kitchen took months (of hell). It’s fab now. Luckily done just in time for lockdown.

We had a similar layout and have just knocked through and it looks like it was meant to be. We have large rooms but the kitchen was one of the smallest rooms in the house before so it felt smaller than it was. We went though a number of designs until one felt right given the money we were paying for it we were happy to wait and not make a rash decision. We have effectively swapped over the dining and kitchen areas so I can look out while cooking (hob on the island) or sit on the barstools with the doors open to the garden. Previously I would be facing the street washing up. When we are at the dining table we are generally focused on each other rather than outside but can see through to the garden above and around the island still. We did think long and hard about the cooking mess whilst eating (large roasting dishes, steamer, wok, stuff that doesn’t go in the dishwasher?) but just accepted it was already like that when we had a small table in the kitchen!

We rarely used our dining room before despite it being nicely decorated and having a lovely view. We also have a small table in our conservatory so we would probably sit in there with friends with kids anyway.

A few of the downsides have been mentioned. It felt echoey at first (tiled floors) but that softened with huge wall canvases and plants. Currently thinking about adding a rug under the dining table. We sized the radiators to make sure it shouldn’t be too cold in winter (not tested that theory yet). Appliances are noisy so eating a Sunday roast while the fan is still going as the oven cools down or the dishwasher is in and you fancy perching with a cuppa etc.

We have an architect coming on Monday to draw up plans for us ti knock down the wall between our living room and kitchen to make one higger space.

Its a load bearing wall. She has quoted us £100 for the drawings, £150 for the structural engineer and £150 to get it signed off by building regs at the council.
Ive not had the full quote grom the builder yet was pleasantly surprised that the steel wasn't as expensive as we thought.

Our rooms are small and i would rather have one bigger space so we can all sit round the table (8 of us when older children and their partners visit).
We will have a corner shape though so the biggest part will be a kitchen with table and the smaller area will be for our sofa/telly.

We don't have a separate space.