We’ve been juggling a few projects around here. After updating the blog design and troubleshooting a missing header, we’ve been continuing work on our $6 cabinet makeover (still mid-paint and assembly), tackling some yard work, starting a small bedroom update, and beginning to brainstorm the next phase of our kitchen. This post is a bit of a brain dump about the kitchen plans and a conversation we had with a designer friend.
We’re saving for new appliances to begin the slow, steady next step of our kitchen overhaul. In the meantime, we met with Nancy Kulik, the certified kitchen designer who helped us plan our first major kitchen renovation through Home Depot. We didn’t need a lot of style guidance back then — we knew we wanted white cabinets and light, marble-like counters — but Nancy’s space-planning advice was invaluable. She knows how people use kitchens and where appliances should go to maximize function, and her layout suggestions made our original kitchen much more useful.
Because we stayed in touch after that renovation, Nancy kindly reviewed a current-to-scale kitchen floor plan and photos and offered fresh ideas. There’s a clear advantage to keeping contact with knowledgeable designers: a quick consult can save years of guesswork and make the space far more functional.
Here’s a quick reminder of our current situation. The eat-in kitchen area currently holds a small dining table that feels too close to the doorway we plan to widen into the dining room. Rather than having two tables visually competing through a large opening, we’ve always planned to replace the small table with a built-in solution that won’t clash with the dining room’s round table.
We’ve also envisioned painting the cabinets white, replacing our mixed appliances (white, bisque, black) with stainless steel, keeping our existing granite counters, and replacing the backsplash with something lighter and crisper. The fluorescent tube lighting and the large brown ceiling fan are on the to-do list as well.
Flooring is a tougher question. We know hardwood runs under part of the kitchen but haven’t confirmed if it extends beneath the entire room. We’ve also discovered some structural limitations: the joists can’t safely support heavy stone or ceramic tile. That rules out some attractive options like slate and leads us to consider lighter alternatives such as cork or resilient sheet flooring. No final call yet.
Back to Nancy’s input. She noticed a major discrepancy between our earlier whole-house plan and the actual room: the fireplace sits much closer to the corner than we’d drawn. On the correct, kitchen-only drawing the fireplace’s position makes it impossible to center an island without blocking the nearby hall doorway. Nancy suggested a solution we wouldn’t have considered on our own: a floating L-shaped banquette that faces the fireplace and the framed wall.
At first we resisted the idea, but as she explained, the banquette would solve the off-centered fireplace problem and create a cozy, purposeful nook. An L-shaped banquette can feel more intimate than an island and can be arranged to align visually with the adjacent doorway to the living room, creating balance in a way an island couldn’t.
The concept Nancy sketched includes two L shapes: the smaller L would be the bench seating facing the fireplace, and the larger L would be built cabinetry wrapping behind the bench. That back-facing cabinetry would look good from the dining-room opening and provide significant concealed storage accessible from the rear, achieving a similar function to an island while addressing the room’s unique constraints.
We’d match the banquette and cabinet tops to the height of the kitchen’s base cabinets to maintain cohesion and openness. We also plan to widen the opening to the dining room to about six feet so the banquette-backed cabinetry looks intentional and the flow remains open rather than boxed in.
To help visualize the layout, we taped the banquette footprint on the floor. The table in front of the banquette would likely be a pedestal-style top — round, oval, or maybe square — to allow comfortable legroom and easy movement. We’ll also relocate the lighting on that side of the room so fixtures are centered over the table rather than awkwardly spaced.
We know many readers may prefer an island, and some will be skeptical of a banquette. Still, we’re intrigued enough to keep exploring the concept. The banquette feels like a smart response to a fireplace that’s off-center and to the goal of preserving sightlines between the kitchen, dining room, and living room. We might build a mock-up of the banquette with cardboard or a temporary cabinet to better understand the scale before committing.
For now, the idea remains on the table while we continue other projects: the bedroom refresh and an office cabinet makeover. We’ll test layouts and materials, continue saving for appliances, and update you as plans develop. DIY projects can be scattershot, but exploring ideas with a knowledgeable designer has already helped us see possibilities we’d have missed on our own.