Open plan kitchen+dining+living area opinion - with plan!

[CookieDoughKid]

Would like to gauge trusty mumsnet opinion on the attached plan. Hubby wants to increase the open plan kitchen dining area to include a living space (sofas x2 and a TV) and bring this right across at the back of the house. To do this, we'd have to reduce the lounge to 3m x 3m approx (see red lines in plan attached).

He wants a clear line of sight from when the kitchen, so he can see the kids (young teens) eating or sitting watching TV at back of the room.

I think it's a bad idea for 3 reasons

1. It'd be more difficult to resell, people want to have their formal lounges and bigger ones too. Open plan kitchen and dining is a good idea but not living area too.

1. The noise, mess, cooking and smells would be reverb all around the house and it would be hard to get away from it all.

1. I don't think it's a great idea to have a TV in a kitchen dining area but I might just be being prudish.

Currently we have a separate kitchen and dining room and we don't eat in the separate dining room as it's cold, small and poky. Our previous house had kitchen dining open plan and worked fine. We ate in kitchen diner all the time and we had a separate living room. Hubby is swayed by the open space which can look amazing but I think in practise it is not. Thoughts? How do I put a vote on this?

YABU = kitchen dining living area - it IS a good idea
YANBU = it's not a good idea - it is NOT a good idea

I think the plan itself is fine as it is come to think of it.

With plan attached.

I would go for the kitchen diner with decent size living room. I would imagine with the kitchen/diner/living area then you would need to keep the one big room you would need it to be immaculate all the time.

I wouldn’t touch your living room, it would be too small and disproportionate if you do what your husband suggests. Could you not put a small sofa in kitchen diner- or open up the snug and make that a playroom that you can see from kitchen?

The bigger lounge is better

I think
The plan looks great!

Ok, just looked more closely, and yes I agree with you, the existing plan is much better than his proposed plan.

I would enlarge the living room but have it half separated. Where you separate is up to you, either a glass (partition but moveable) wall between the dining area and living room (keeping LR big) or 2 smaller seating areas with a glass partition allowing them to be together when needed.

Personally I would prefer a larger sitting room that can be separated off when wanted, the L shape will give a degree of separation.

Leave the lounge and open up the snug instead.

yanbu

The fire in the new smaller living room will be against the new wall, the proportions are all wrong, and why does your husband need to ‘see’ the children eating and watching tv? I can understand if they were 5 years old but they are teenagers and very soon will be young adults so I don’t understand his reasoning.

I agree with leaving the lounge as it is and opening up the snug, maybe add some
of the lobby space too. It’s cheaper. Fireplace is in the right place in the lounge. Lounge has no cooking smells. Separate lounge with a second TV appealing with teenagers. Solution appeals to all buyers. To stop clatter of crockery/ pots/ worktops clashing with TV noice, maybe just change the snug wall to a glass wall and door.

I would leave the lounge separate, surely with teenagers you want to watch different things or at least not be in each other’s space all of the time? If you open it all up you may push the children upstairs to their bedrooms to get some space anyway which would be less desirable, given what your dh is wanting.

Do you use the garage? I would move the utility into the garage and then open up the current utility and snug space and put sofas/tv in there. Then you can keep the large lounge

Definitely keep the large lounge - the seating area your DH wants looks narrow and not that usable

If you don’t use the garage convert that.
Put a utility where the doors are, maybe have a downstairs shower Room and convert the understairs cloak room into a coat and shoe cupboard. You shouldn’t need a snug then.
Your plan will have a massive cost and mess implication due to those external walls and steels.

Agree it looks too narrow for proper usage if you split it. Either open it up all the way or not at all.

I would suggest that this needs a proper concept planner to look at this with you. We had a similar 'through a couple of doors ' route to our utility room and one of the first things that Karen from OnePlan pointed out was a more direct route with a laundry basket in your hip is a must . So here you could have a laundry with access from hallway ie cone downstairs and into laundry - and go back up again - without dripping socks through your dining room and kitchen on the way !

Open plan kitchen/dining/living is ideal when your kids are small (though the mess is astronomical!), but as soon as your kids hit secondary school they will want their own space and retreat to bedrooms to achieve it. They no longer want to share the living space with mum and dad!

Thanks all for your feedback. Some very good points especially about lounge size, teen years and positioning of utility room. If a few more mumsnetters could respond that would be fab as hubby thinks this might be too a minority view (mumsnetters being an eclectic special bunch lol).

If you go with his plan you'll end up with two snugs! I'd suggest (if you're definitely going to extend) a very wide opening between dinjng area and lounge with sliding doors to partition. Glass sliding doors so you're view of kids is intact.

That creates one large long lounge so that needs dividing, I'd put a study area at one end, maybe foosball table the other.

I would rather buy your house now than if you changed it. Agree that if you need space look at the garage. But if it's how you want to live then do it.

Even more reason for you to bring in a professional designer .

Def keep the large lounge otherwise you will have nowhere comfy for gatherings.

Opening up into the snug would work. It's very noisy watching TV in an open plan kitchen/diner/TV room but will work fine.

It seems like a large home so you would need a large lounge for it to "balanced".

Leave the lounge as it is, rotate the utility 90 degrees so it aligns with the garage and do away with the snug, but put sofas in that space.

I’m with all those saying open up the snug!