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.