Kitchen plans:New layout

The layout of our kitchen sucks.

Like I said before we have next to no counter space. 

I HATE having the stove up against the wall and the fridge sticks out suuuuuper far into the dining area/walkway. Wasted space in the dining area and hall china cabinet and a peninsula with a dishwasher that makes using the cabinets next to it impossible.

So here is the plan so far, courtesy of my awesome brain and a pen and paper:

All soffits will be removed.
Duh.
Upper cabinets raised and crown added up to the ceiling.

Here is the L-shaped main run of cabinets which includes sink and stove......

Dishwasher flush against the wall, get rid of the peninsula and open it up!!!
Also planning on taking down the lonely upper cabinet and putting in some open shelves.

Round that corner and where we removed the counter cook top (second pic from top) is where we'll be relocating the stove.

As you can see from the before photo there isn't a ton of room but I would rather move the stove than have a big base corner cabinet. We'll be gaining a bunch of storage elsewhere and we're already used to living out of 7 cabinets so I'm not worried. I refuse to have a freestanding stove (vomit) so this will most likely require a custom cabinet built on the outside, possibly open storage for cookbooks like I drew. 

We'll see.

On the wall where the stove is now we will have this:

Framed in fridge and four feet of uninterrupted counter space!!! :)

So those are the plans and as you can see I already have all the measurements written below each cabinet. That is because we already have the cabinets, they're stacked tetris style in our garage until spring.

My Aunt and Uncle recently bought a condo and after gutting the kitchen, generously gave us the cabinets and granite counter tops. 

How awesome is that!?!

The cabinets are really, really nice oak and will look really, REALLY nice once they're painted.

This ^ run of cabinets just so happens to be 48" inches and will fit perfectly beside the fridge. That also means one less cut of those granite counter tops-kind of the straw that broke the camels back for moving the stove.

Granite looks like this close up:

Along with the base and upper cabinets there are also two pantry cabinets-24"ish wide by 6ft-ish tall. 

One of them will be built in at the end of the hallway and the L shaped banquette will run from there under the window to the dishwasher cabinet. 

Also planning on ripping out that china cabinet in the hallway and putting in a real pantry with a single door.

Stay tuned for a million inspiration pics and plans!