Open plan living

[noddyholder]

Would you prefer big kitchen/diner/living space and an additional small cosy type tv room or a seperate kitchen and a big living room?I am trying to decide re our new house and am looking for pros and cons really

I have a big kitchen/dining room and a smaller, separate living room and there are pros and cons (as in all things). When we bought it I envisaged myself cooking in the kitchen while making witty conversation with guests at the dining table - which kind of happens but can be a bit off-putting, depending on the guests. Like I always feel self-conscious cooking when MIL is there (feel like she's judging me on the way I chop onions) and also when something goes wrong everyone knows Plus, when the kitchen is a mess, the whole space looks messy.

It's nice to be able to cook dinner while the kids sit at the dining table doing homework/drawing though. Though when ds2 was little I had to invest in one of those partition wall/child gate things to keep him out of the kitchen and it was a lot more expensive than a conventional gate.

So...when it's tidy, and I have guests who I don't feel are critical of my cooking, and everything is going smoothly then...yes open plan is great. But if you've dropped the roast on the floor in front of your MIL and want to cry then it's not so great.

god i would hate people to see me cooking - it is all red-facedness and banging pans about and swearing .

And how do you keep steam/smoke/whiffy cooking smells out of the living-room bit if there's no door?

Think a kitchen-diner is nice for kids, but living room should be separate as should more formal dining.

Open plan all the way. I spend a lot of my spare time in the kitchen and would love to have the kids in as well.

I have a small living room, largish kitchen/diner and have just had a big conservatory built coming off the back. The kitchen/diner and conservatory can be open plan or seperate as have doors seperating.

I like have 3 different living areas and the kitchen diner is large enough for dining table so kids can do homework etc. whilst i am cooking etc.

We've just turned our all open plan (was 2 receptions plus kitchen, is now a through lounge open to kitchen). You do need a good cooker hood extractor fan but otherwise I love it. We've only been living like this a couple of weeks but I love being able to cook and still watch the kids whatever they are up to (but mine are still very young). I have 'zoned' the space so we have a 'tv slouching' area and a dining/kids play zone area (if we ever had a formal dinner we could put the kids stuff out of sight, but we only tend to have friends with small children over, in which case open plan works well).
We have hedged our bets and can put in dividing doors to seperate off the front room if, when the children are older, we decide we want to, but I can't see us putting a wall back.

I am thinking of having a big room with kitchen dining and living area plus a separate smaller living room so will have somewhere to get away from the mess.Otherwise have kitchen with dining area (quite small) and a big living room.The living room in the new place is 20x20 and the kitchen only 11x11.So I thought of moving kitchen into living room and using the kitchen as a living room iyswim Like the idea of one big multi purpose room that I can close the door on in the evening

I have open plan. Living room merges into play area (formerly dining room) through 'arch' to dining room and I have one door to the kitchen.

Open plan is great for making your space look big. I think my house looks big and spacious.. also when I have guests I move the sofas back to enlarge living area, when I have play dates, I move them forward so the children have more space. That is worth its weight in gold. If DD manages to keep her mess in the play zone, then it works quite well... but too often everything just spills over and the whole house looks messy and I have no doors tro hide the mess from strangers!

So open plan is great if you're tidy, but if like me, you're not it can be a bit of a mare!