My kitchen is in the basement of my house (a tall victorian terrace of average dimensions).
The room is of a fairly decent size but is restricted by the following:
- bay window (small window quite high up which brings in light from the street above)
- it's also our main dining room, so everything is a bit squeezed in
The units are L-shaped - along the bay and down the right hand side, while the lower left area has a table and four chairs.
The kitchen is knocked through to a decent-sized living room, which we keep as a lounge/playroom rather than dining room as it works for us this way. (any sensible person though would no doubt keep the kitchen as a kitchen and stick a big dining table in the lounge!
Anyway, the whole thing needs to be replaced and I'm trying to think carefully about making best use of space. One thing we need to do is have a larger (extending) dining table and I have always fantasised about having a lovely big larder. And then I had a genius idea! On the other side of the right hand kitchen wall is a nice big cupboard (full of junk). It would be feasible to knock through and wall off a small part of the hall too to make a fairly large cupboard accessible from the kitchen.
Attached is a scale outline of the kitchen, with a dotted line showing where it would be knocked through. The current cupboard is the square bit, and the irregular shaped part would be the corner of the hallway which could be included as part of the new cupboard.
What I would like to know is, how much storage would this realistically provide? I'm a bit useless at visualising a cupboard full of stuff! I would be aiming for food storage mainly - pans and crockery could go in deep drawers in the kitchen and cleaning-type stuff is already in a small utility room elsewhere.
I was thinking of shallow racks on the first two walls as you enter, for bottles, jars and spices, then U-shaped shelves inside the cupboard itself.
Ceiling is a decent height - 2.4m, and the cupboard area is just short of a square metre at 90 x 90cm.
This cuboard would increase the dining area of the lower half of the kitchen as there would no longer be units down the lower right hand side.
Thank you for any suggestions anyone can provide!