I had a wall between the kitchen and dining room removed from my home in Maryland in 2008. The original kitchen was like a small horseshoe, and this 10' island is right where that wall use to be. The refrigerator and cabinets were on the right side of the kitchen. We didn't lose that much cabinet space because the bottom of the island is all new cabinets and the refrigerator we moved to the left side next to the sink.
We ran into problems that you won't face, with a two story home the A/C ducts, five of them, ran through that wall. Those ducts had be rerouted to the other side of the dining room. There was a basement, so the subfloor was removed in the dining room so the A/C mechanic could see where to tie in the new ducts to the trunk line. Also we installed recessed can lights in the kitchen and got rid of the old kitchen light.
Because of all that extra work with the A/C, the subfloor and the demo of the wall and new wood floor installed, it cost about $10,000 do what we wanted. The project was $21,000 total, but that included 1000sf of flooring (bamboo floors), install of flooring on the entire first floor, redoing the electrical, the A/C redo, install cabinets, granite countertops (Santa Cecilia), new appliances (Whirlpool), sink, faucet, backsplash. It did not include the cabinets and hand pulls. The cabinets were high grade self closing and were $6,600 and the handles were $300.
