Kitchen diner

[madblondedogg]

How big does a kitchen need to be to be able to make it into a kitchen diner?

Looking to extend off our kitchen to make a kitchen/dining room and so gaining an extra bedroom. We'd like to make the extension as small as possible to save money.

How small can we go would you say?

Depends on how many kitchen units you are fitting in as well!

Is there anywhere else to have a dinig table or is this your only one?

Depends on the rest of oyur house as well. A small 3 bed terrace - a tabel for 4 people in the kitchen would be fine. A 5 bed house, you'd be looking for a bigger table.

At the moment we have a room set up as a dining room but the ideal situation would be to turn that into a bedroom and extend off the kitchen to make a kitchen/dining room.

If we do that then the house will be 4 bedrooms and a study/small bedroom.

The kitchen will need redoing at the same time.

I'm looking at doing this too... I have a south facing dining room, and a north facing kitchen... Would love to have an RSJ put in and knock them together. Finished size would be about 3.5x6.1 metres... Not massive, and I'm a bit worried about losing the wall of storage that's currently in between the two. However would probably do a 'u' shaped kitchen so would have under bench storage still. Unlikely to have money for another 5 years or so, so not any urgent concern!

Ours is a similar width to yours Ida, to get 6m of length we'd need to do a 3m extension. I'd ideally like to do more like 2.5m to reduce the cost but I just can't work out if that would be big enough

Our kitchen is 4.7x3m and there's plenty of room for a table. We can seat 6 people at it if necessary (although it's much more comfortable with 4).

The cost of 3m as opposed to 2.5m will not be massively different.

3m would be better but you might get away with one long of units and a table on the opposite side.

Because of the way our house is built on a hill as soon as we go more than 2m the price per m goes through the roof

I think we can get away with just under 2m and it becoming a kitchen diner I'm just concerned about making sure the space balances (not too many bedrooms for the kitchen space)

Because of the space constraints on extending, I think this is probably a situation where getting the opinion of a few architects would be worth the time/money - you can get a few out to discuss ideas and should only have to pay if you actually get one to do the drawings properly.

If you have a four-bedroom house, I think you need a reasonably-sized kitchen diner or the proportions of the space will look odd. How big it needs to be to fit in a decent amount of units plus a good-size table depends a lot on the shape of the room, where the windows/doors are etc. I wouldn't be jibbing about 0.5m.

I would mock up a kitchen design then you'll know how many standard units etc you can fit. You don't want to spend loads of money and be left with a odd sized wall for kitchen.

At the moment there is an old style conservatory at the back of the house which is about 1.5m wide so the floor has already been built up. This would reduce the extension costs considerably if we can use that.

We would end up with a kitchen diner of 3.54 x 5.6 if we just use the conservatory space. Would that be big enough?

We would end up with a kitchen diner of 3.54 x 5.6 if we just use the conservatory space. Would that be big enough?

Mock it up in the ikea kitchen planner with the units you want/need and a table that can seat [6] people.

Our kitchen diner is quite small bit has a slim long table so we can seat up to 10 without too much fuss. The main part of the kitchen, the diner is 3.7 x 3.7m. THe kitchen part off of this is about 2 x 3m.

Put in an island unit that partially faces the dining area - the longer side. Put a built in seat on that side of the island with storage underneath. Then have the table and chairs, or bench, the other side of that. You gain storage in the island and it is a very space saving solution. Saw it in a magazine the other day. Or build the bench into a return of units that act as a room divider. What you lose in wall storage, you gain in the return.

For what it is worth, my kitchen diner is 5m X 7.5 m but it is a big house. If you skimp on the size of an extension, and it really should gave been bigger, the resale may not be as good as you wish because if it is still pokey, you will put buyers off. You will still need a retaining wall for the garden!

If its a very old conservatory then the foundations might not be good enough to build a proper extension on. We knocked down an ancient conservatory to build an extension and had to have the foundations completely redone.

Oh really, that's a bit of a shame. Was hoping to avoid that to cut the costs down

We have had two kitchen diners now that were about 3m x 5.7 m. We have fitted an extendable dining table in plus a small conservatory-type sofa, although day to day there are just four dining chairs. Much smaller would be a bit of a push IMO. It helps to have a separate utility for all your washing/cleaning stuff. The occupants of a 4 bedroom house generate a lot of washing!

It also depends a bit on the shape - a long room can have a "kitchen end" and a "dining end" - a squarer room might have dead space in the middle.

IMO your 3.5 x 5.6 should be just OK if thoughtfully laid out. 3.5 is wide enough for units on one side and a table/chairs on the other. It's never too early to get onto Ikea planner, and think about where windows/doors are and walking routes through the room. We had some rubbish layouts from kitchen companies that only had breakfast bars not a proper table.