Kitchen/Diner/Family Room - How big?

[titchy]

We want to knock through our kitchen/breakfast room (16 x 12) into our family room (16 x 9) to make one big kitchen/family/dining room. Our dining room is currently upstairs - it's a townhouse type arrangement with living room upstairs as well. Having a formal dining room upstairs is a pain in the ar$e so we tend to eat in the kitchen, but with all the kicten units there's only room for a table and 4 chairs, so if we have guests we all have to traipse upstairs for Sunday lunch etc. If we knocked thorugh we'd have a 16 x 21 room. Is this big enough? Does anyone have any floor plans that show how we could use this space? Or any other bright ideas?

TIA!

That sounds a really nice sized room but it depends where things such as windows and doors come as to how useable it will be. If you go to www.magnet.co.uk/kitchen_planner.asp you can do a simple layout of how it would work. If you are going to spend a lot of time there, I would see if there was any space to jemmy in utility and downstairs loo.

Thanks lala - I'll check out that site. There already is a downstairs loo with a shower. We plan to take the shower out and put the washing machine and tumble drier in its place so we'll have a sort of utility room (well, utility cupboard!).

Perfect

That sounds great If you fit the kitchen well and use all the space you might be able to fit in a tv area too.

That's the idea noddy - tv area downstairs for the dcs while dh and I have sole use of the living room upstairs (with the huge flat screen tv we intend to buy in the sales! ). Sounds very 'Boden' and not sure in reality how it'll work but we'll see....