Kitchen peninsula - overhang for breakfast bar or not?

[noobmum]

I've been following this forum for quite some time but it's my first time posting here so hi everyone!

I'm looking into building a peninsula between my open plan kitchen-living room, in hope of increasing storage and worktop space. Ideally, the peninsula has an induction hob so that I could prepare meals in the kitchen while keeping an eye on DS and DD in the living room.

The dilemma that I'm facing now is whether to have a 30cm overhang or not. Obviously it can be then used as a breakfast bar but I also think that it makes it less easy for DS/DD to reach up to the hob from the overhang side too which is a plus.

Any experience/thoughts welcome! Thank you :)

I think the positives for having the overhang are:

• As you say, harder to reach hob from far side
• Works better as a breakfast bar that way (you could put stools without overhang but I don't think it would work so well)

Downsides:

• Potentially harder to reach cupboards underneath if you have some accessed from the far side
• If you are pushed for space you might not want to use up the extra 30cm

Personally I'd go for an overhang - we are in the process of getting new kitchen and are having one.

We're in the middle of kitchen works. We knocked down wall between kitchen and dining room, and have put a very wide peninsula in. On the kitchen side is the induction hob, and on the dining side is an overhang with breakfast bar. The idea that the kids will sit there doing homework / having snacks, while I cook supper etc... We have full size deep drawers on the kitchen wide under the hob (plus a space for a bin), and then on the dining side they used wall cupboards (which are half the depth, so give the overhang). If you do this you either need to get laminate (and accept a surface with a seam down the middle, or get one made up specially in Germany), or go for a seamless surface (more expensive, but looks great.) We went for the latter (something called Bushboard Encore, in calico) and it does look really good. Finally, we decided on a downdraft extractor fan (as I don't like the ones that come down from the ceiling)... The jury is still out on this, as we haven't got it working yet! But in theory it will be great!
Good luck with it!

Yes, definitely go for overhang so stools can be used. There's someone sat at our kitchen island pretty much every minute of the day, I love it.

Thanks for all your replies!

madcows it sounds similar to what I have in mind for our kitchen. We are looking at downdraft extractor too as I'm not too keen on hacking our ceiling for the hood. Your worktop looks fab too! May I know how much they cost you please?

Can't remember costs I'm afraid... everything blurs into LOTS. But do remember it was about twice the cost of laminate. But having only ever had laminate, and being fed up of seams that wents yucky, we thought it was worth it!

Appreciate that, madcows. I'm using laminate too at the moment but the they have been joint up quite nicely so not much problem with muck (yet). I do like the seamless finish of other worktops, though.

Another struggle is that we don't see this as our forever home and we're probably going to stay here just for another 5 years or so. The peninsula and downdraft extractor, for instance, are a huge investment but works best for us I reckon.

I can only hope that the kitchen improvement will bring value to our home, even by just a little...