am I mad not to knock thru between my kitchen and dining room?

[Mercedes]

We've just started on planing out kitchen extension. At the moment we have a tiny kitchen with hardly any units so the plan is to have a larger kitchen with a small area for eating breakfast. etc.

We've got a large living room/dining room that runs the length of the house. As it runs east /west its always really light and bright and I like sitting in the evening on the sofa looking out.

I've been in lots of my neighbours' houses and they all seemed to have gone with really large kitchen diners. They're lovely spaces but...I like to leave dirty dishes and kitchens behind closed doors and if its open plan you can see them all the time.

Does anyone still like to have a separate kitchen? If we go ahead with a small kitchen extension might we as well go for a larger one and it won't cost that much more?

Any thoughts gratefully received as I am now doubting our own ideas.

If you want to be able to leave the dishes, and/or don't like to have cooking smells through the rest of the house, then a separate kitchen is a much better idea than going open-plan. It's also easier to keep small children away from kitchen stuff, and means any visitors can't see you cursing, frantically sieving the gravy, scooping things back off the surface when they've slipped off the plate, etc...

I've got open-plan and I love it, but it would have been a hassle when DS was small. It also means I can still talk to people while I cook.

DH and I totally agree with MumInScotland about the advantages of a separate kitchen - dishes out of the way, no-one to see things going wrong, smells kept out of the house, children kept out when potentially dangerous things like jam bottling going on, etc. We cook a lot (an awful lot) and really like to have that separate space - we find it so much easier for entertaining.

Can you have a small eating area in the kitchen but keep a separate dining room?

Could you re instate the living ropom and then have a big kitchen diner across the back with maybe a small sofa tv/radio so a family room and have a formal sitting room?

We have a large seperate kitchen. Its worth imo for the reasons you want. I can shut the door on the dishes, the smells don't go through the house and also when I entertain the guests don't see the kitchen .

We are thinking of putting in 2 sets of double doors between the living room and dining room so we can make the space cosier in winter but I don't want to lose the light in summer. Although I could reinstate the living room it will be very dull after midday.

Most people dodn't seem to use dining rooms anymore.
Although the kitchen will not be a large one we are planning or at leats the architect has suggested a little niche to have breakfast - at the moment we all stand in out tiny kitchen with plates on the drainer and worktop.

We use our dining room for most meals, but we do eat our breakfasts during the week on a little breakfast bar carved out of our galley kitchen. It works very well.

We have what sounds like a similar layout to you and what we are doing is keeping the through sitting/dining room and having a separate kitchen but which is big enough to have a small table & chairs so it is fine for family meals but not a big open plan space iyswim