Kitchen companies

My Dad thinks I should fully knock the kitchen and the dining room together, but the dining room is one of the nicest rooms in the house. It's somewhere I hope to spend a lot of time once the house is sorted a bit and I can move some furniture in, so I'd like to keep it at least somewhat separate. However, I also think the kitchen needs to be a bit bigger to really work. That might mean widening the doorway between the kitchen and dining room and having kitchen cabinets along one wall, but keeping the end of the dining room as more of a separate space. Other than my parents who have been a few times, my only other visitors have been my brothers who came once right when I first moved in) and two friends, one of whom only saw the living room! I'm definitely not one for entertaining, but I do enjoy cooking and baking and would love a kitchen where I have space to get stuck into a proper project.

I've been "living with" the kitchen as it is for the past 8 months. However, that's meant taking the doors off the top cupboards and lining the shelves so I can put my kitchen things and food there, while the lower cupboards are too disgusting to clean and have been left shut/as wasted space. It means no oven (the existing one doesn't work and isn't worth trying to get repaired), a hob that I can't use my cast iron on, and now big holes in the rotting floorboards (that the oven is threatening to fall through) and ripped up lino/tiles! Not to mention the ancient (and leaking) plumbing and 1950s wiring... I think I've probably lived with it for long enough! Definitely time to get on with the renovations (especially as I've got to stay away in another town most nights for the next year) so that I can finally move in properly. Most of my stuff is still in storage. All the bulky things are at my Grandma's house, but that will go on the market once probate comes through so I need to get the messy bits of the renovation out of the way so that things can finally come here. As it stands, I'm still sleeping on either a blow-up mattress in the bedroom or the settees that my vendor left, and doing my laundry in the bathtub with a stick to swirl it around. I want my house to feel a bit more like home so it's time to crack on!

I'll try to draw a floorplan (there wasn't one with the house listing) to post here.

Sounds like you need a general builder rather than a national brand kitchen fitter. Good ones will have excellent connections with other, more specialist tradesmen and be able to draw up plans and project manage.

I used an online company (it might have been Howdens) to design my kitchen trying various layouts. It even had a 'walk through' to visualise it!  Not recommending this for you but I then bought a kitchen off ebay which had loads of units and jiggled them around to fit my design.
I don't think there is a right or wrong kitchen design and kitchen designers would all come up with a different one, so I designed my own.

Having had several different kitchens over the years, I've got to know what I want from a kitchen, which isn't always what a designer thinks I need.
For example, they want to put cupboards on the walls over every worksurface. These are pretty useless when you're only 5' and a bit tall as I can only reach the bottom 2 shelves on tip toes. Also, they cast shadows on the work surface and its easy to bump your head!!. I have wall cupboards on one wall only, along with a dresser cupboard and a full height unit that used to have a microwave and fridge in it.

All water things go on the outside wall to make plumbing easier. If you put those on your plan first then you work out from there.

Having had several different kitchens over the years, I've got to know what I want from a kitchen, which isn't always what a designer thinks I need.
For example, they want to put cupboards on the walls over every worksurface. These are  pretty useless when you're only 5' and a bit tall as I can only reach the bottom 2 shelves on tip toes. Also, they cast shadows on the work surface and its easy to bump your head!!. I have wall cupboards on one wall only, along with a dresser cupboard and a full height unit that used to have a microwave and fridge in it.

All water things go on the outside wall to make plumbing easier. If you put those on your plan first then you work out from there.

Sink,fridge and a stove in kitchen triangle apparently less walking?