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

[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!

[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.