Bricking up kitchen door - has anyone done it?

[msgloria]

Our kitchen has an external door that leads to the side passage way running alongside the house. We also have doors that open into the garden from the dining room, which is semi-open plan to the kitchen.

The kitchen is square with three different access points - from the hallway, from the dining area and from the outside door. So kitchen flow is an issue. Bricking up the outside door would give us a good space to place a fridge freezer when we replace the kitchen, moving it from the annoying place it's in now.

Has anyone done this, and regretted it or not? It seems somehow "wrong" to lose the kitchen door, but at the same time I don't know how big an issue it is, as long as we're retaining access from the back. We don't have pets and we access the house day to day from the front - we have a decent sized porch so no particular issues with muddy clothes etc that a kitchen door might potentially help with.

I'm going to lurk here as it is an option for us as well to claw back some kitchen space but we would have to open a new door in the dining room into the side return. I have no idea on cost or difficulty though.

I was very interested in purchasing a house a few months back which had done exactly this. In the end I dismissed it for the lack of kitchen door leading outside plus the dining room being the only access out to the garden.
There was also no side access to the garden, meaning everything would have to go though the house. Would you have this issue as well?

We have side access to the garden that would be retained if we bricked up the kitchen door. Side access was one of our "probably none-negotiables" after living in a terrace.

Our dining area is semi-open plan to the kitchen already and has hard flooring, so I don't know that it would be much more of pain going through the dining area from the garden compared with going through the kitchen from the garden.

For me the issues are fire safety and taking out the rubbish.
In our current house we did remove the kitchen door, it's opens onto the dining room and into the hall so fire escape isn't a problem. Other people were dubious about taking the rubbish out through the dining room but it's fine.

In our old house we decided against it due to layout I don't think it would have been fire safe.

We did, we were broken into one December via the kitchen door. Side of house was / is a bit obscured from front / rear so when we had an extension we bricked up the kitchen door. Now just have access to garden via bi-folds and have not regretted it for a second.

We’ve done this - not a terraced property but we have a front door plus doors to the back garden so we only used the side kitchen door for taking out rubbish. Having it blocked up means that we’ve been able to have a much bigger run of kitchen units on that wall. A slight pain still taking the rubbish out but totally worth it for the extra kitchen units which on balance are much more useful on a daily basis.

Your house sounds a similar layout to us. We bricked up our side door 5 years ago & haven't regretted it at all. Rubbish goes out the front door usually when I leave for work.

I rejected houses that did this because I didn’t want to take my rubbish through the house. Honestly in your position if I really wanted space for a fridge I’d block the door to the hallway rather than essential access.

Interesting comments, thanks. The point about security is a good one - the kitchen door is totally concealed from the back and the front, so I imagine it would be the door of choice for a burglar.

We always take our rubbish through the front as that's where our shoes are. The outside bins are at the front rather than at the back.

If we bricked up the kitchen door from the hallway, we'd only be able to access the kitchen by walking thorough the living room, and then through the dining area. We already have space for a fridge freezer in the kitchen, but it's currently awkward to access in relation to the kitchen island.

The kitchen is a decent size - about 16 feet by 13 feet - but being quite square and having all the access points means it's quite an awkward space.

If it's just a case of moving the fridge freezer around, why not just put it where you want it (in front of the door) and try it out for a bit. Then you can see if you miss the use of the door or not, before you actually block it up.
We did similar in our three doored living room - we popped the sofa so it was blocking the door, so we could see if it worked, and then actually got round to blocking it up about 6 months later when we were sure.

We did it and back access was through the conservatory so it worked very well

Thanks @Bettiespaghetti, that's a really good idea. To be honest in the admittedly short time we've been living here we haven't really used the side door at all. I was more wondering if bricking it up is something you just shouldn't do, like turning the second bathroom in a five bed house into a sixth bedroom, something like that. If that makes any sense! I think I'm reassured by this thread that it isn't inherently a really bad idea. I will check the fire regs situation however.

We did it 18 years ago and don't think about it now

We did, it allowed us to have the kitchen layout the way we wanted it. If we kept the door we would have lost a huge amount of storage.
It just means we have to walk around the back of the house to get to the bins, no big deal.

My only concern would be kids coming in from the garden wet, diet, muddy etc straight into the dining room.

I did.

Our kitchen backs onto the garden so we bricked it up and replaced the window with French doors.

The bricked up door now has the washer dryer in its place on top of each other.

Do you want some pics?

*dirty not diet!!

If you had a large kitchen diner that was one room, no one would give it a second thought. You could exit to the garden wherever you want. I would get rid of it. Go via the dining area. Three doors in a kitchen does make it difficult.

Our kitchen door won't open (it's old and the wood is swollen) so we only have the one way out, it's not a safety issue for us as both doors out of the room are at immediate right angles to each other and before you get to the hob and oven. If it's safe without it then I'd do it.

We have a utility off the kitchen with external door to side of house, and also door from utility into integral garage. We never ever used the external utility door (it had 3 locks on it for security!) and bricked it up last year when doing other building work.
Like you, we use French doors to garden
We did put a small high window in the gap so that utility has some natural light.

This is all fascinating - those that did it - how much did it cost and how long did it take? Did you have to render the outside wall to make it look ok? What did you do with the doorsill? So many questions.

@ChristopherTracy

The bricks we matched as best we could.

I replaced the window in the kitchen with French doors. £550 from wickes.

The bricks I couldn't match didn't really matter as we built a gazebo with a roof over the French doors and Ex door as it was dead space. I covered this with fake ivy.

I took out my kitchen door into the alley when I had a new kitchen. I'd lived there 20 years and rarely used that door to access the garden as went out through the conservatory so haven't missed it at all.