Current floor plan

It seems the first thing one must do is arrive at a floor plan for the future kitchen, particularly deciding on the locations of the appliances and sink. Here's a floor plan of our kitchen, empty:

The door at the top (South) is the main entrance to the house for all except salesmen and evangelists. There is a hall to the left leading to our dining room, though a bit of a coat closet. The swinging door at the bottom leads to the study, and just to the left of that is the door to the basement. The radiator takes about 36" under the windows. The right is an outside wall, but there's a porch above the top. Now, here's our current kitchen layout:

The cabinets at bottom right are full-height, the rest are normal counter height with 30" uppers. I added a countertop over the radiator held on with some shelf brackets.

We took this plan to several cabinet stores and let kitchen designers fool around with them. The most popular thing to do was to move the refrigerator into what is now the coat closet. We don't like this idea, but it does create quite a bit of counter space in the kitchen. The oven, sink, and fridge can all be swapped around but this gains very little, and the choices are quite restricted. (Dishwasher must be near the sink; neither stove nor dishwasher may be in a corner; fridge must not be next to a wall, etc.) Some designers wanted to remove the wall so the bottom left countertop wraps into the coat closet area, forming a sort of Z-shaped counter.

We didn't really like any of the ideas which involved removing walls (not because we don't want to remove walls... they just didn't seem to work), and just swapping things around doesn't seem to improve anything generally.