How best to use this space? Kitchen/Utility/Dining Room?

[Andehh]

We are at a very early stage of considering how best to replace out kitchen. We are in a new build house, 8 years old, and the budget kitchen is really starting to show its age.

I am curious as to peoples opinions as to what we could do with the Kitchen, and one suggestion we are looking into is removing the internal walls between the Kitchen, Utility Room and Dining room and have it as large open plan room, with glass folding doors replacing the utility room:dining Room wall, and just having the utility room combined with the Kitchen?

The two walls sound hollow when tapped, but I cant for the life of me work out how the house has been built. All the internal dividing walls I have tapped seem hollow, so where are the supporting ones?



Edit: it's a bigger kitchen, enabling a table to be put in for kids etc, and being able to open up to the dining room - vs- smaller kitchen, but utility room and dedicated dining room?

Edited by Andehh on Friday 31st October 11:45

[BigTom85]

I'd knock it all through for sure, and forget about internal sliding doors or any physical divider between the room as I don't think they would add anything really.

[Gingerbread Man]

Your walls are most probably dot and dabbed plasterboard onto masonary, this method creates a slight void between. The plasterboard and block, thus a hollow noise.

[JimbobVFR]

Ignoring any supporting wall issues for the moment I'd be tempted to move the utility to the rear bit that sticks out, maybe not all of it but enough. you still get a much bigger kitchen diner but still have a utility room, best of both worlds possibly.

[Andehh]

Looks to be a solid wall, on second inspection. Apparently neighbours a few houses down took the wall down to make a bigger kitchen so will have to see how they did it. They have the same style house as us. They did leave the dining room though.

Utility room is either there or nothing, moving it to the end would give it the end window, main radiator and would be awkward being off the dining room.

Thanks for the suggestions guys, welcome any more! Do want to make sure we don't negatively effect resale values when we look to move several years time!

[dxg]

Personally, although the layout is not ideal, I would try to keep the utility room.

Two reasons:

1 - It can act as a mud room / tradesman's entrance for daily use. A place to disrobe and contain the dirt and water before entering the house proper.

2 - Having somewhere to put the washing machine etc. that's not part of an open plan kitchen and which is, therefore, visually and - critically - audibly isolated is, in my view, a huge bonus.


In the structural wall angle, I'm going to guess that the walls down either side of your hallway / stair well are the load bearing ones. That would keep the joist spans the shortest anyway. Try lifting a bit of carpet upstairs to see which direction the chipboard runs in - the joists will obviously run in the opposite direction.

Speaking of structural stuff, can anyone recommend a good engineer in the East Midlands - I have a thread elsewhere in this forum but no one's yet replied. Maybe there aren't any...

Edited by dxg on Saturday 1st November 10:36

[Andehh]

Thanks for your reply mate, see where you are coming from. Need to try and nose at the neighbors who combined the utility room & kitchen into a larger kitchen. Current kitchen is a tad small for a 4 double bedroom house, there is a small plinth that comes off the shared wall for two people to sit opposite each other but it is too high for children and too small to be comfortable for adults.

Having the washing machine & freezer, as well as 'crude' storage is nice to have, but the reality is we never use the sink in there, cupboards are all full of my tools (have a garage & big shed which they should be in...) and the rest of it is just wasted space.

Might ask the estate agent who sold us the house for their opinions. Want to make sure anything we do to it only adds positively to re-sale value.