Guides · 2026-10-05

Taking out the wall between the kitchen and the dining room

Most kitchens in Marion’s Harding-era foursquares and postwar ranches were built as a room with a door. When people talk about opening one up, the wall they point at is nearly always the one toward the dining room. That wall is rarely empty. It tends to carry the upper cabinets, sometimes the fridge, and in the older houses a cupboard that opens on both sides.

What happens to the kitchen cabinets when the wall to the dining room comes out?

The cabinets on that wall come out with it, and in a closed kitchen that run of uppers is often the biggest single block of storage in the room. The layout changes, so the plan is new custom kitchen cabinets drawn for the new shape, not fresh doors on the old boxes. Two questions follow: where the lost storage goes, and what fills the line the wall leaves on the floor.

Look at what sits on that wall now, top to bottom. Uppers over a stretch of counter are the common case. A fridge at the end of the run needs a new spot and usually a tall cabinet or panel around it wherever it lands. If you were hoping to reface the other walls and leave it at that, our guide to refacing or replacing already puts an opened wall on the replace side.

Does the wall have to stay partly, and who decides that?

Sometimes, and the cabinet shop is not the one deciding. In an older house the wall between kitchen and dining room can carry part of the floor above, a heating duct, a drain from an upstairs bathroom, or the wiring for the switches by the doorway. Whether it comes out entirely, leaves a post, or keeps a short return at one end is the contractor’s call. If it bears load, that is a question for an engineer or the building department.

The cabinets get measured after the framing is settled. A post that lands a few inches from where everyone pictured it moves the end of a run.

Where does the storage go when the upper cabinets are gone?

Onto the walls that are left, and into taller and deeper boxes. Uppers on the remaining walls can run to the ceiling where the soffit allows. Base cabinets can trade doors for deep drawers that take pots and small appliances. A tall unit or a pantry takes the bulk the old wall used to hold. Counting what lived on that wall comes before any of it gets drawn.

Do the count literally. Open the doors on the wall that is going and see what is inside. Usually it’s the everyday plates and glasses, plus the baking pans nobody wants on display. The plates matter most. They used to sit within reach of the sink, and their new home should be about as close to the dishwasher. In a kitchen that has lost its uppers, that is often a wide, deep drawer below the counter.

If a pantry is going to take the bulk, our guide to where a pantry can go works out which wall can give up the space. It also makes the call on the old pass-through cupboard, which applies when a short return keeps that cupboard in place.

Should a peninsula go where the wall used to be?

Often it is the natural spot. A wall that comes out leaves a strip where two floors meet, usually the dining room’s wood on one side and the kitchen’s tile or vinyl on the other, plus any post or stub the framing kept. A base run or peninsula set on that line covers the seam and gives back some of the counter the wall took with it. Above counter height the two rooms stay open to each other.

A peninsula earns that line when the kitchen needs the counter and the dining room can spare the floor. It also suits a house where a post had to stay. A cabinet end wrapped around a post looks planned, while a post standing alone in the opening looks like something the remodel couldn’t get rid of.

Nothing should replace the wall when the opening was the whole point. A small kitchen that felt shut in is the usual case, or a dining table that already sits close to the old wall. In those rooms the seam becomes a flooring question and the cabinets stay on the walls that remain.

A custom kitchen island in the middle of the floor is a different plan, and with an island the seam belongs to whoever does the flooring.

What should the dining-room side of the cabinets look like?

Like furniture. It is the side people see from the table. A cabinet run on the old wall line shows its back and one end to the dining room, so those get finished back and end panels in the same wood or paint as the doors, not the plain box sides that would normally face a wall. A counter overhang for stools belongs there only if people will actually sit on that side.

Older Marion dining rooms often keep their stained woodwork while the kitchen goes painted. The pairing works when the painted run stops cleanly at its own end panel instead of reaching for the dining room’s trim. Where it does meet original casing, the new profile has to match the old one, as it would on any built-in in those rooms.

The dining side can also hold something. Shallow doors on the back of a peninsula take placemats and serving platters, some of what the old pass-through cupboard used to hold.

What has to move with the wall, and what does the cabinetry cost?

Anything mounted on the wall or running inside it moves too. The range hood, the outlets and the switches by the old doorway all need new homes, and a sink or range on the new run means plumbing or venting work by those trades. Full custom kitchens in Marion run $12,000 to $35,000, and an island or peninsula is one of the things that moves the number.

A hood is the one people forget. If it vented up through the old wall, the duct needs a new route, and a hood over a peninsula is a different piece of equipment from one hung on a wall.

Cabinets added on the old wall line are priced like the rest of the kitchen, by the linear foot installed. Painted custom runs about $350 to $650 per foot and stained hardwood about $450 to $800, both from our page on what a custom kitchen costs, and both are planning ranges until the room is measured. The wall work itself, the framing, the patched ceiling and the floor between the rooms, is priced by the contractor who does it and is not in the cabinet number.