What can you do when your kitchen is in the wrong place?

Builders, architects, renovators, designers, and just plain clever homemaking types, please pull up a tastefully-decorated innuendo-free Moroccan pouffe, lean in close, and help me out here, PLEASE HELP ME.

It’s my frickin kitchen.  It’s in the wrong place. Whoever renovated the house before we moved in was either A. holding the floorplans upside-down, or B. demented.  Because when you walk in through the front door, you take three steps up a short hallway, and there you are, in the kitchen.   Which is great if you’re carrying lots of heavy shopping from the car and don’t want to walk too far.  But not so great if you want to live in a house THAT DOESN’T HAVE A KITCHEN RIGHT NEAR THE FRONT DOOR.

Why did we buy a house with a kitchen right near the front door? Probably because we couldn’t afford any of the houses that had kitchens that weren’t right near the front door  (houses with kitchens-near-front-doors tend to be a bit more affordable, like houses that are built on sinkholes, or Amityville Horror houses where whole families have been murdered).

And I guess my wife and I always thought that one day we would renovate the house and move the kitchen to a less front-doorsy location, maybe beside a bedroom, or inside the back toilet. But when we actually sat down to think of a kitchen-relocating plan, we were stumped:  if you move one room somewhere else, another room has to move somewhere else, then another room has to move somewhere else – it’s like one of those sliding tile puzzles you had when you were a kid that you could never solve so you chucked it at your sister’s head.  Exactly like that.

Then we wondered if maybe we should move our front door to a less kitcheny position: if we shifted it to where the living room is, people would enter the house to see a couch and a coffee table, which is more aesthetically pleasing than entering a house to see a stack of dirty dishes and a rancid dish sponge that nobody ever wrings out.  But when we actually sat down to think about door-repositioning logistics, it got tricky: we’d have to move the living room window to where the fireplace is, then we’d have to move the fireplace to where the TV is, then the TV would have to go outside in the backyard. And then where would the table tennis table go?  Is a life without table tennis even worth living?

Over years and years we’ve considered everything, EVERYTHING.  Making the kitchen more welcoming with mood lighting and a plush three-seater dishwasher. Getting rid of the kitchen altogether and just living off take-away chicken souvlakis. Going berserk in the kitchen and murdering each other in a horrific Amityville Horror rampage.  It’s too hard, it’s hurting our heads, so if any of you builders, architects, renovators, designers, or just plain clever homemaking types have a solution, please throw them my way like a kid chucking a tile puzzle at their sister’s head.  Or even better, just drive down my street and yell it out your car-window as you pass.  You’ll see me through my open front door, cooking in the kitchen, waving a spatula back at you.
Danny Katz is a newspaper columnist, a Modern Guru, and the author of the Little Lunch books for kids, now a new TV series on ABC3.