Over the course of the past year we’ve made some good progress on the house and feel relatively confident about tackling the remaining rooms. But the kitchen, for reasons I’ll go into in just a bit, has left us scratching our heads and we know we need expert input and help for this room.
Let me show you a bit of our Pinterest-fail kitchen. I didn’t straighten it up before snapping these photos because this is real life: unwashed dishes, laundry drying, and stuff with no available storage taking up what little counter space we have.
Soooo…in case you didn’t get your fill of ugly from our messy house tour, some of you may leave here needing to find pictures of kittens for therapy.
And for those of you who are in the same boat as we are with your kitchen looking like an in-between-projects-phases madhouse, I’m giving you a virtual hug of encouragement, and a high-five for making things work for the time being in your kitchen too. :)
Ready?
When we first moved in, this corner and a little 15″ deep counter top and cabinet space was the whole of our kitchen. A lot of the kitchen was already gutted by the previous owners, so all plumbing and electrical were updated. Though as we later found out, the plumbing left much to be desired.
Our behemoth fridge is planted like an elephant in the room.
The two doors flanking the fridge are as follows: on the left is our pantry with the only remaining original cabinets in the house.
To the right of the fridge is our laundry/mudroom:
After the summer of ’17 dishwasher debacle, much of our flooring, our dishwasher and all of the side counter/cabinet unit had to come out and this is what we presently have in our kitchen…I call it our “half wall”…
If you’re curious about why the cabinet had to come out in this spot, read about what we found our “lovely” past owner did that made it impossible to keep.
Though most days that area now looks like this…
I know it’s hard to resist pinning our kitchen for inspiration…except if you want to use it to make you feel better about your kitchen…
…then I completely understand.
With the flood and half our cabinets and counters gone, a ton of our kitchen utensils, pots, silverware, toaster, etc. got the boot and now reside on the floor and in our pantry, atop our radiator, and anywhere else we could manage. It’s a little chaotic trying to make a meal when our tools have been tossed to the wind.
One silver lining about the dishwasher leak was we did have to put in new flooring as a result of the water damage last summer. We love how the floor looks like Cararra Marble and has no grout seams or textured dips to trap dirt.
Which is great because we live in a construction zone, and dust and dirt is always EVERYWHERE.
If you’d like more pix and info on our new floor, check out our post all about our faux marble kitchen floor.
Over the past 7+ months we’ve been making our kitchen work the way it is, and at least things are much better now that we don’t have to wear shoes to make a meal or worry about a flood every time we wash dishes.
…And as the kitchen renovation expert, Victoria herself, has stated so eloquently, it’s amazing what you can live with when the idea of having to go through ANOTHER construction ordeal in your home looms over your head. There are days where I feel like I can deal with the kitchen the way it is. Almost.
But as you can all imagine, the reality is…WE NEED A KITCHEN.
A Functional Kitchen:
As with most old homes, the current modern-day appliances and kitchen setup is not using the space efficiently and lacks in function and flow, as well as storage.
The total square footage is 142 (10.25×14). There are four doorways in the kitchen and one large window that does not allow for anything counter-height below it, and a chimney to also make a design challenge more fun.
Here’s what the kitchen layout looked like before “the flood“…
We cannot change the height of the window without grossly shaking up the whole architectural look of the exterior of the house. I’m firm on this one. In the picture below the arrow is pointing to the kitchen window so you can see what I mean:
As for the doorways, we’ve gone back and forth a TON about if we could close any of them up to get more wall space, but it’s not possible if we want to keep a circular flow to the main floor of the house. The doorway next to the chimney goes to the entryway, the doorways flanking the fridge go to the pantry and mudroom/laundry room, and the last doorway is to our living room.
We can’t borrow space from our entryway either because our stairs are right along the shared wall with the kitchen.
We’ve also thought about maaaaybe moving our laundry/mudroom to where the back porch is off of the mudroom and locate the fridge to the current mudroom, or make that the breakfast nook or something, but that would mean closing in our porch and all the new construction costs that would incur with that. And I like our back porch…
We’d love to make use of every square inch of the kitchen that we can squeeze out, but with these particular room quirks, we’re at a bit of a loss on how to best do that.
Karl and I are both avid cooks; all meals of the day are made here and thus the kitchen is where we spend a lot of time in, as well as entertain in when we have friends and family over.
With the present layout, especially with the close proximity of the stove and sink, it is difficult and frustrating to maneuver in this kitchen with two cooks.
I also have Celiacs, so we have to split the kitchen when we’re both cooking so as to avoid cross-contamination in prep.
Counter-space is already limited, and each finding a place to set-up as a workstation has been a challenge.
For storage, our current cabinets all have very odd dimensions and therefore it’s not easy to use them efficiently.
Example: the crappy upper cabinets are not standard-sized, but come in at 11.5 inches deep and therefore our doors don’t close properly where we store our 12″ dinner plates.
Cabinets like this for our dishes would be dreamy:
Speaking of finding more storage space, let’s talk about the radiator in our kitchen.
It’s beautiful. I love it. But it’s also taking up space in an already-small kitchen. I’m thinking the best thing to do in this corner would be to install open shelving above the radiator. Or a shallow upright plate or spice rack.
The countertops we inherited with the house are something that I know a lot of people like (so please don’t hurt us) but they’re the Ikea wood block counters. …and we don’t like them.
In terms of aesthetics they are nice, but we’ve found them to be high maintenance. I don’t know if the past owner who installed them skipped a step called “sanding”, but they’re not smooth.
Wiping up crumbs or flour should be easy, but it’s not. It becomes infuriating, so we’ve gone into a mode of not wiping up until the end of the day, and honestly, I really hate that. I want to be able to CLEAN.
We still need something more family-friendly (a.k.a. it can take a friendly beating) and low maintenance. I’m 99% sure we’ll go with Soapstone when the time comes.
One thing in our favor though are the high 9-foot walls, but they’re definitely not being taken advantage of in the current setup. I’d love to have cabinets that go up to the ceiling.
Now we come to our huge chimney.
Here’s the scoop: we’ve found there’s plaster over the original brick chimney, then the previous owners added a faux brick with some kind of black “tar-like” substance over the plaster.
We can’t remove the chimney because it is helping hold up the floor above it, and we would rather not mess with anything structural. Plan B was to work around it, so when we first moved in I had started to white-wash the bricks and paint the ‘mortar’ of the bricks white, but then winter hit and with it any chance for open-window ventilation…and I got pregnant, so…paint and ladders…and thus why it’s only half-completed.
Perhaps most infamous of all is our “door to nowhere” on the other side of the chimney that used to lead into the adjoining room (on the right in the pic above), but the previous owner dry-walled over the other side of it, leaving an odd sealed door on the kitchen side.
There’s not much space (the basement door opens opposite from it on the left), but I’d love to toss around ideas for what to do with that area – shallow shelving? Coffee and tea nook? Hooks for broom and cleaning supplies?
Appliances:
Fridge: It’s perhaps a bit odd in this day and age of “bigger is better”, but our fridge really doesn’t work for our space or needs. It’s huge and we hardly fill more than a third of the fridge.
It’d be nice to sell our inherited-with-the-house fridge and go with a slimmer, counter-depth model like this one:
Better yet, if we could find a slim fridge that also is panel-ready (and in our budget by being a dent n’ scratch, for instance), we could make panels like that of an old ice chest, such as this:
Dishwasher: Our dishwasher was never used. But now with a 1-year-old running around, time is precious and I’d like to be able to chuck our dishes into a dishwasher, start it up, and forget about it.
I’m considering an 18″ sized dishwasher since we could use it daily. It’d also help give us a little more cabinet space. Thoughts? Any one have regrets owning a smaller dishwasher?
Microwave/Vent: Ahh, our stove vent. The mega-huge microwave also functions as out stove vent. A common setup. Besides the mega-huge microwave that we really don’t need, the vent causes a rather fun effect on our gas burners of making them get higher and blowing them to the side, a trick that will likely catch our sleeves on fire one of these days.
We’d like to downsize the microwave and put it elsewhere in the kitchen, and install a hood fan that isn’t going to be a fire hazard when used above the stove.
Stove: This one I can already say is going to take priority in our budget (along with the cabinets). We want a WORKHORSE, something that can not only take a beating, but will still be kicking long after even we are.
…and we would LOVE to have it fit the era of the house. If the stove could look like it was here since the house was built, that would be AMAZING.
That’s why we’ve begun researching antique stoves and reproductions.
Though reproductions are pretty much ruled out at this point, because we were sorely under-impressed with the one we saw in-person.
We’ve only just started to learn about our options with this niche of stoves and already it’s like my eyes have been opened to a WHOLE NEW WORLD of cooking. There’s SO MUCH I want to share with you guys about how amazing antique stoves are (and how I now feel that they’re a national treasure, as valuable and worth saving as our old homes!).
I was curious about WHY people would want them for daily use still today, and now I am enthralled and there’s no going back to ever looking at Viking stoves or Induction or anything new on the market.
There’s so much that there’s a whole other post I’m putting together just on antique stoves, but let me tell ya, it holds true for stoves as well with OLDER BEING BETTER!
Sink: Again, we want something that fits the era, so I have been keeping an eye out on antique cast iron sinks, though I can’t jump the gun yet on any of the deals I’ve seen because we don’t have a layout, thus no measurements to know what size sink we can manage.
I DO know that I want it to be a high sink back with at least one drainboard, like this:
Would love to hear any good tips/stories on how to hook up an old sink to new plumbing.
Design:
Because I’m all about a good paint job, I have to add that the former owners had a tendency to “glob” paint, and these poor cabinets were not exempt from the punishment. Every cheap crappy particle-board cabinet has been made to also look as cheap as they are with thick paint, runny drips, and noticeable brush strokes inside and out.
…and same with the original 100+ year old tongue and groove that runs along the perimeter of the room, which is not only globbed but also painted a lovely, sickly “poo” color. Ugh.
This is what it’s supposed to look like (this is the untouched section that remains in our pantry):
I’m going to attempt to strip all the paint off of the tongue and groove boards and re-stain.
As for the crap white cheap cabinets, they’re getting the mallet as soon as I get the green light to go berserk.
Which means now we get to the fun part – the new cabinets! We would love to stay very classic and bring in a 1900’s era look to the kitchen while keeping modern amenities.
I’ve been playing with both two-tone and all-wood kitchen ideas for years on my pinterest board and want to incorporate a bit of each look into this kitchen. I’d also love to give the kitchen “furniture” in place of cabinets wherever I can, such as a hutch, stove, or stand-alone cast iron sink. Here’s some examples that strike us right in our classic-kitchen loving hearts:
Gets the wheels turning, amiright?
For cabinet hardware, we want something classic and evocative of the early 1900’s, likely brass or cast iron bin pulls and latches.
If it’s AT ALL POSSIBLE, I’d love to squeeze in a table & chairs and have it double as a workspace island. That way it pulls double-duty (and again fits the era, as islands were not a thing yet), and I could have less of an ordeal wiping up the floor after our baby girl eats, as compared to the dining room hardwood floor we’re using right now for meals. It’d also be great for allowing guests to pull up a chair and chat while we’re busy in the kitchen.
Now that you have a good idea of our present kitchen conundrums, let me sum up by listing what isn’t working for us so we know what to prioritize when we start talking plans (and a budget).
Makeover Wishlist:
- a better flow and use of existing space to the kitchen setup; use every square inch
- cabinets that reflect the era of our house but with storage solutions that every OCD personality dreams of
- countertops that are low-maintenance and forgiving
- more wall outlets
- more traditional lighting (there’s track lights over our half wall and awkwardly added recessed lights in a bulkhead over the main cooking area)
- restore original wall bead board
- REALLY want an area for a kitchen table
- smaller fridge
- a working dishwasher
- new stove vent/hood that doesn’t create a fire hazard when the vent is turned on (we don’t need such a huge microwave either)
- antique stove
- antique high-back sink with drainboard
That’s everything about our kitchen and the direction we’d like to take it in a nutshell.
NOW IT’S YOUR TURN TO VOICE YOUR IDEAS! Tell me your layout ideas for the space (or anything else!), cause boy do we need them! Thanks! :)
24 Comments
I love some of your ideas but first I gotta ask, exactly how many of those doors are indispensable and how many could be relocated?
The other thing that has me scratching my head is why on earth did you throw out that cabinet that you had to remove to repair the door. When I was renovating our bathroom I tore out the cabinets but kept a bank of drawers, one for myself and one for my hubby that I could move around the room as required. I just kept a chunk of the counter top to set back on them. It was all very ugly but it kept me sane by keeping the clutter under control. Could you not have provisionally set that cabinet back in place?
Love the idea of an old stove but I think that the sink with a drainboard will take up far too much real estate, besides which they are not all that beautiful, especially if they are old. Imagine putting a drainboard by your sink that you currently have and being unable to move it. Unless it is being used it serves no purpose and do you really want to have constant clutter on your counter just to justify owing it.
Hullo, Rosalie! Always glad for your ideas! I just updated some parts of this post to help better address some of your questions, but I’ll respond here too so you don’t have to go looking. :) I’ll start with the sink: it’s definitely true that the old sinks can take up a lot of space, so it is a concern for us to find one that would be the right size. Our current sink has a drainboard and we use it everyday for drying our dishes and love it, so I would love to be able to keep having that benefit with our next sink. We’re thinking about whether we could have the sink be in front of the window if it has legs and extra-sturdy cabinets for support below it, and then maybe install shutters on the lower half of the window so it doesn’t look weird from the inside or out. What would you say?
The cabinets that got torn out was because they were botched by my the former owner when, as seemed to be the usual, he got lazy and never installed a wall behind them, and then went so far as to bolt them to the actual wall studs. Geh. The stress on the cheap particle board wood of the cabinets as we tried to remove the bolts was too much on the cabinets, so they cracked and tore and became no more. We did save the drawers and are still using them to store the things that were in them (they’re currently in the pantry) – It’s ugly, as you say, but I would go insane otherwise too haha. ^_^
For the doors I just added a floorplan to this post that hopefully better shows the situation. Hope it helps!
Thanks! :)
HI Kelly: Linda D asked the same question that was on my mind, can’t you expand the kitchen into that entry. Then I looked at other posts on you blog and I see that the entry is indispensable because of of the stairwell. Honestly, without doing some reconfiguration this kitchen is going to be a bit of, er, I mean, a huge nightmare to design.
You have to admit your wish list (which I love by the way) is very long and your space is very short so unless you can create more space from what you have I have no idea how you will be able to accomplish it.
I think at the very least you are going to have to replace that window with something smaller so that you can at least use that space, especially if your heart is set on a big sink.
Since you asked, personally I don’t think it would be a good idea to put your sink in front of the window, I think it would look very odd and the shutters would be annoying because you would constantly have to look over them
The only solution I can see is to get rid of the mudroom and pantry and move your laundry, hopefully to the basement if you have one. Or you could incorporate a stacking unit into your kitchen. It looks like you have windows in both those rooms so probably one or both of those would have to go as well.
As regards the radiator is there any way that it can be moved or chose a different style that is not so cumbersome and invasive like maybe a baseboard style? I realize that by the window is the ideal spot for any heat source particularly if that is where you are going to put your sink. it might be worthwhile calling in a heating specialist to see what might work better, there are always new products on the market. If you were to expand into the laundry/pantry perhaps it (or a bigger one) could be relocated to that area.
Sorry that should read floor not door with regards to removing the cabinet.
Hmmm…interesting challenge! I look forward to seeing the results. Can you close off any more of the doorways to gain more space? Can you adjust the window so the bottom is counter height? Can you get a smaller radiator? Are there counters that can be put over a radiator? When I was a kid we had a radiator covered with a metal thing…which looked ‘nice’ but also got dangerously hot. I do not have a small dishwasher but would love to hear about it if you pick one. I had old stoves for years and loved cooking on the stove top. Lighting the oven with a match could be frightening. The older stoves are not insulated as well as the newer ones…so your kitchen will heat up…as will the stove. They are also HUGE ….which might lead you to have to pick between a big beautiful older sink or a big beautiful old stove. …..unless you can steal space from rooms near by? Eliminate a formal dinning room? And I think skinny cabinets in front of the faux door (like the blue ones in your post) would be beautiful. Good luck!
I had not thought about upper skinny cabinets in front of the “door to no where”, so thanks for the idea!
A cautionary word on soapstone counters… it was all I ever wanted until I got them. I was unaware that they chip and scratch easily. My toddler has tossed toy cars on the mad I have several gouges. :( If someone had told me, I still might have put them in, but I would have liked the knowledge. Best of luck! I don’t envy you.
I *carve* soapstone as molds for metal jewelry. It carves very easily, so I expect it would likely gouge easily. If you can, have the supplier give you a piece of offcut from another one of their jobs and bring it home to play with it to see just how well it might hold up. Best of luck!
Hi, Jen! Thanks for the cautionary tale. I too have been set on soapstone for awhile, and did learn in the research phase about its softness. I questioned myself when I learned about that chance of scratching, but then I have some close friends who did their entire kitchen in soapstone counters several years ago and have a baby, and they told me how they sand any scuffs out and make them look like new, so I’m sold all over again, lol. Maybe I should use their counters to do a short video of how to sand out something in them in a future post?
I think you are right to consider flow as your first challenge. While it’s great to dream about cabinet finishes and hardware, solving the underlying layout issue will go a long way towards allowing you to break down your dream kitchen into manageable pieces. It’s like building a good foundation to a house. Once you have the Plan, you can break down the individual components so you don’t break the bank with a do-it-all-at-once kitchen reno.
I’m probably old enough to be your mom, so I’ll share a couple of mistakes I made when we moved into our house some thirty years ago. My first mistake was looking at the kitchen piecemeal. By that I mean I changed a window that was broken without first considering flow. In hindsight I would have closed in the back door and changed the double window to french doors. (I’m not suggesting this for your kitchen, just pointing out that I wish I’d considered the Big Picture before I tackled smaller challenges — like your ‘too big’ appliance issue. Before replacing them with smaller scale models, I’d take a look at rearranging the basic layout. Not only will your fridge and dishwasher needs likely change as your young family grows, but you may find that a different layout opens as yet undiscovered possibilities.
As for layout, I don’t know if your first floor drawing is to scale, but can you possibly steal space from your entry, which appears to be as big as your kitchen? I’d also see if I could find a way to incorporate the pantry into the room. It’s kind of hard for me to visualize since I haven’t taken the time to combine the two drawings so I can see all the built in challenges you are facing (like the height of the window, the radiator you love and want to keep, and the false door).
I seem to recall that you swapped out the dining and living room spaces so you could use the larger room as the living room. (I maybe wrong about this.) In any case, there may be less of a need to connect your kitchen to a living room than there is to have it connected to a dining room. I understand your desire to keep a circular flow, but is that really more important than capturing more kitchen space for two avid cooks?
Take your time considering how your growing family’s needs will change as you move forward before designing solutions around problem spaces. Not doing that was my other big mistake. Seven years down the road I found I had to tear out things I did piecemeal when the better solution for me would have been to wait until I had enough money to invest in the long term solution. Lesson learned.
So, I guess my take is that I would spend my time *thinking* more before I allowed my itchy fingers to tackle messy projects or buy new appliances. (I painstakingly stripped a whole bunch of woodwork and repainted before realizing that the entire wall had to go. *sigh*) I wrote to save you our mistakes — well, ha ha, some of those mistakes are what my grandmother called Life Experience and inevitable. My larger point is that you likely WILL make some decisions you regret, and don’t sweat it. House renovation is a learning experience, and if you can stand the dust and the impatience the journey itself can be enjoyable. Best wishes on your adventure! <3
Hi, Linda! Thanks so much for your amazing and detailed comment!
We’re definitely in the “thinking” stage right now, and all of your suggestions are great ones to add as we try to come up with a plan. No doubt that no plan is ever perfect, but I like how your Grandmother called it “life experience”. ^_^
Is it possible to access the mudroom and pantry from each other and remove the door to the kitchen placing it between the two?
Hi! Thanks for the comment! I’ll have to make a more detailed layout drawing of where things are and measurements so it’s easier for y’all to see everything. :) The current wall between the pantry and mudroom is the only place that fits our stacked washer/dryer. The opposite wall from the w/d is our back door. It could possibly be done if we were to do a bump-out addition for the w/d or such, but we’re trying to find any good ways to do this remodel using the floor space already available in the kitchen since any other plan would mean needing an addition. I’ll update soon with the better blueprint so we can all be on the same page and put our heads together. :)
I don’t have any advice to share, but I’ll just say that your kitchen and mine have similar issues – refrigerator too big for the space, original wood floors destroyed by screws, dishwasher that flooded, no range hood, not enough counter space, even an old chimney! (My house was built sometime between 1900 and 1910.) I’m curious to see how you work through your kitchen’s issues. We are waiting for our last child to finish college before we embark on a major renovation.
Wow! How interesting that they share so many similarities, right down to the building time frame. I wonder if our homes were built using the same plans? How is your kitchen functioning for you right now?
You have had several comments about soapstone and the problems it might present so I saw this on Houzz and thought I would pass it along as a possible alternative in case you didn’t see it.
“Perimeter countertops. Sarah, pictured, wanted a low-maintenance natural stone and fell in love with honed Jet Mist granite years ago. “It looks like soapstone and is very forgiving,” she says.”
Here is the whole post as there are oodles of ideas in this kitchen.
https://www.houzz.com/ideabooks/105259905?utm_source=Houzz&utm_campaign=u7430&utm_medium=email&utm_content=gallery0&newsletterId=7430
Thanks, I have not seen this article and will definitely read it!
Me again: I see that you added a picture of the exterior of the house with the window in question. If you really wanted to change the window I think that you could do it and still maintain the overall symmetry. What I would do is take out the window, frame in the new window keeping it the same width. I would install a new window with a single pane(but double pane glass of course) and have it be one of those top hinged so that it can open out. Then on the bottom I would create a filler panel so that you can keep the same overall frame height dimension and put the shutters back. Plant something below it along that side of the house to deflect the eye and I swear no one will notice the difference, it will not be offensive to the eye at all.
hehe love all your wonderful comments, Rosalie! Thanks for the idea here. I’ll have to see if I can find some images/examples online of what you’re describing, as I’m visually driven. :) Sounds like an interesting idea.
Yeah, I don’t think that you will find a picture because it probably only exists in my mind but if you put in a smaller window you will have an empty space below it. That space will be filled with framing and then insulation, vapor barrier and drywall inside so that you would never know it was changed, but on the outside you need to put some exterior treatment. That would consist of probably plywood panel painted black and then it would have an added white frame around it which would hopefully look more or less like a continuation of the window frame. Put the shutters back on and because the shutters are the same and the white ‘frame’ is the same then it really would not be very noticeable. Obviously if you are standing outside examining ever detail it will be noticeable but a man on a galloping horse, I guarantee, will never notice.
Ah I see what you’re saying. I’ve seen that used to elongate short windows versus making bigger holes in the wall for bigger windows, so now I’m picturing it. I know I’m being a stickler, but unless it was a bump-out with its own set of windows or something that makes it set apart from the rest of the house (and we’ve thought of a bump-out there too but still can’t get over how it messes with that beautiful side of the house), it doesn’t quite fit still for us. We have a 90’s bay window that was placed by the last owner on the other side of the house, and it really ruins the looks of that side. It’s probably why we’re so against changing things on the still-beautiful side, heh. And I know there’s ways to make the bay window look more like it was meant as part of the house, but it’s still not the point I suppose. We’re weird I guess. ;-P
I say move the stove to the chimney wall, with a bit of counter to the side of it. (If the counter was on the right side, you could then do open shelving above and on the side of the chimney.). Moving the stove will free up room in the L of the opposite side of the room. Perhaps a fridge can be moved there, and incorporated into the L? Then the place where the fridge is could be open shelving, top to bottom….or a bakers rack or something. Would there be room for an island (ie, more storage)? Possily a smaller one? Is the radiator functioning….ie, your heat for that room? If not….get rid of it. I get it, it’s pretty…but toss it. If you choose to strip that tongue and groove…you’ll prolly have to remove it all first. Eek. Getting the paint out of the grooves may not happen without removing it. It could be sanded down some, to get rid of the gloppy paint, and repainted in a non-poo color. I suggest sanding those counters now, first, and oiling them….to get rid of the issues you have with them. I have unfinished butcher block counters, and they are smooth as silk. I think yours maybe got water damaged, which raised the grain and made them weird?!?! I like the work you did on the chimney…it makes it look good. The weird door…..could THAT become your entrance/exit, and the other door on that wall closed in?! That would give you a nice bit of wall space for cupboards!!!! Think about how that would work with the room on the other side….it could solve a ton of problems. If so, I would just frame in the opening and remove the door completely.
Hi! Thanks for the long, thoughtfully given ideas. :) Switching the 2 doorways (“door to no where” and the other door to the living room) has been on our minds too, though we keep going back and forth over it. We’ll have to see!
I agree as well that our counters were NOT done correctly, perhaps never even fully sanded and given a sealant. The last owner was in a bit of a rush I believe since he just wanted to sell asap, so it is possible they were never finished.
Think of it this way…..the door to nowhere won’t give you any extra space if it gets closed in. The other door WILL give you more storage room if closed in! And you still have your round-robin floor plan downstairs.
Figuring out houses and floor plans is fun….and can also make one a bit nuts! Lol!
Your house is gorgeous!!! You’ll figure it all out at some point! Enjoy!