I'm offering the following as a devil's advocate. Both positions for your kitchen are viable choices with nice reasons to go each way. That's why you need to draw up all possibilities to consider. If the middle is right for you guys, this will end up reinforcing that decision. Versatility and size? That 15x30 room is looking very, very nice as it is, but the far end is prize square footage with all those exterior walls (light/views in up to 3 directions), and right now you plan to actually dine there very little--pretty but underused. If you put the kitchen down there, that addition would be used as intensively as it deserves to be. The living area for furniture placement would be the same, but it would be more strongly defined. Nevertheless the whole should still appear very spacious because it would still be part of a 15x30 room with kitchen on end and still be open to the north, which would extend additional living activities that direction, instead of east. The dining room might well end up used more for various activities in the middle of the house. In considering this alternative layout, how about a pretty door to the outside from a middle/dining room, French perhaps? And for that matter, are you sure you wouldn't have a door directly out from the kitchen? You have an entry in that end that looks as if it would need some reconfiguring too. Would it enter the middle/dining room? Last night I also thought of one other -- possible -- advantage to switching the kitchen and dining room: the step down. This could be a design asset for a dining room, setting it off as special as viewed from the living room. Since you don't plan to eat there a lot, even with young children you could have a nice rug under the table if you wanted it. You'd take that step mostly on the way back to the children's rooms--longer journeys. For the kitchen, you guys'd be making all the many, many little daily journeys between the living room and kitchen on a level floor. Morning sun in kids' hallway? Have sunshine everywhere and you eliminate the pleasure of entering a sunny room. A dim hallway is often a design asset because it makes the rooms opening off it all the more inviting. I can't see what that cabinet in the hall is, but with a little attention to attractiveness and interest, the hall looks pretty good to me. The only way I could imagine to improve it would be to extend it to come back around on itself -- children love to run in circles. :) As it is now, though, the hall enters a sunny middle room in the mornings, setting that room off really nicely, however it's used.

New proposed layout. I did a mock up in in the IKEA home planner but it will most likely use a local cabinet company.

I like where you're going with this. A couple ideas: you will probably need to move the door anyway to fit the cabinets, fridge, etc. One benefit will be you can open the door on a right-hinged fridge into the doorway. Check out the Liebherr fridges. We have had three in different properties, including two 24-inch ones. Love them. Some people here are fixated on drawers, but they do waste a certain amount of space, particularly in a shallow cabinet. To me, a shallow cabinet, as you are proposing under the windows, works well with shelves, because there is not a lot of stuff behind other stuff. On the window wall, you might consider a wine rack, if you would use that: depth is perfect. On the other wall, I would go with one bank of wider drawers - they will hold more. I would do, from left, a 24" dishwasher, 30" single sink, drawers, 30" range, tray cabinet, 24" fridge. You can get by with a 30" hood. Above, a 24" cabinet, nothing above sink, upper cabinet, hood (with 3" gap on each side), maybe a narrow spice cabinet, then a 24" cabinet over the fridge. You can do a garbage pullout under the sink, or a tip out on the window walk.

I am not a pro by any means, but I do love sketching to see "what would we do".. so here's something maybe different, maybe not, but at least it's something to think about. The scale is approximate 1 sqaure=1ft, based on your pictures and I hope I got all the doors in the right locations! At first glance, yes your kitchen looks very disjointed, lacks flow and it looks like you have a lot of wasted space in the middle of your existing layout. Starting at the top Wall "A" would be pretty much the same as you had it, with the countertop continuing over to Wall "B" but at 12" depth, with 12" uppers. Then there's your door, which I agree you need to keep to have access to your bathroom and bedroom. To the right of that door is another 12" base cabinet and countertop with 12" uppers (or a full height 12" pantry cabinet). I had two ideas for the rest of this wall, pretty much playing around with fridge placement and pantry storage. The first pic shows a 24"d pantry cabinet wtih dead space behind, but keeping flush with the 36"w fridge (wouldn't interfere with dishwasher when open), and then another larger closet style reach-in pantry. You could have lots of shelves in there, with a 24" door. Or, have standard kitchen pantry cabinets, 24"d , again with a bit of dead space behind them but keeping flush with the fridge (if you want to avoid another door). The second option is to have the fridge more "in " the kitchen, with a larger pantry by the basement door and windows. Again dead space if you go standard 24"d cabinets, or another set of doors for the reach-in closet style pantry but this would get you the most storage space. Walls C and D would remain unchanged from your current plan. But then I though a penninsula would be nice, to have the sink somewhat facing your front windows. Building out the wall against the stairwell would give you space to have an overhang for seating or if you don't want seating, have extra 12'"d base cabinets facing the windows to maximize storage. This makes it feel more roomy in that "hallway" from stairs to dining. Or have less dead space and move the entire peninsula 6inch to the left and have 54" spacing in the kitchen between the sink and fridge wall. Have some uppers in the stairwell wall, Lot of options to play around with! But i think this way you are keeping all your doors, getting much more storage, and better flow.