The Grocery Trip That Should Take 30 Seconds — But Doesn't
Kitchen too far from garage? This floor plan mistake is more common than you think. Find out why builders keep making it, the hidden resale impact, and how to fix it at the design stage.
Picture this. It's a Saturday afternoon. You've just come back from the supermarket with six bags of groceries. Your garage door shuts behind you, and you now begin what can only be described as a small expedition through your own home.
You walk through the garage entry. Then down the hallway. Past the living room. Through the dining area. And finally — finally — you arrive at the kitchen, where these bags were always meant to be. Your arms are red from the handles, the frozen peas have been at room temperature for four minutes, and somewhere in the third bag, something has definitely leaked.
This isn't bad luck. This is a floor plan problem — and it's baked into millions of homes.
Why does the kitchen end up so far from the garage?
Historically, home builders weren't designing around your Saturday grocery run. They were designing around cost. The more utility functions — kitchens, laundries, bathrooms — that could share a common wall with plumbing running through it, the cheaper the build. This meant clustering wet areas together, often toward the interior or the side of the home farthest from where cars would eventually live.
The garage was an afterthought in many older floor plans. It was bolted to the side of the house, wherever it fit, with little thought given to what happens operationally when these two spaces — the garage and the kitchen — are at opposite ends of the home.
In newer homes, this has gotten better. But the legacy of cost-first floor planning lives on in a staggering number of houses, both new and old.
It's not just inconvenient — it's a daily tax on your time
Think about how often you bring groceries home. Once a week, maybe twice. Every single time, you're completing this same unnecessary journey through your own house. Multiply that over a year and you have dozens of trips, hundreds of bags, and a cumulative physical toll that nobody signed up for.
Now add children, elderly parents, or anyone with mobility limitations, and what was already inconvenient becomes genuinely difficult.
The problem compounds if your kitchen is also far from your back door, your outdoor entertaining area, or anywhere else that food and supplies might need to travel. The kitchen is the operational core of a home — everything flows through it. When it's marooned in the floor plan, everything becomes harder.
There is a real monetary cost hiding here too
If you are ever putting your home on the market, this layout issue shows up in the walkthrough. Buyers notice it — often without being able to name exactly what's wrong. They walk in from the garage, mentally carry their shopping bags through the living room, and something registers as off. That subconscious friction translates into reduced enthusiasm, lower offers, or the home sitting on the market longer than it should.
A well-designed home where the garage connects directly — or nearly directly — to the kitchen is a genuine selling point. It signals that the builder was thinking about how people actually live, not just where the pipes were cheapest to run.
Caught early, it's just a redraw. Caught late, it's furniture and workarounds.
If you are currently in the design phase of a new build, this is a five-minute conversation with your architect. Moving the kitchen adjacency to the garage entry point is a straightforward adjustment on a plan. It costs nothing at the drawing stage.
If you are already living in a home with this problem, your options get more creative — and more limited. You end up optimising around it: leaving a folding table just inside the garage, doing multiple smaller trips, or accepting that this is just how your house works. None of these are real fixes.
The floor plan is not something most people think about until they are living inside one. But the decisions made at that stage — often by a builder optimising for cost, not lifestyle — shape how you experience your home every single day.
The grocery run is a small thing. But it happens every week. And good design is precisely about making the small, repeated things feel effortless — so you never have to think about them at all.