Kitchen of doom

So here's the kitchen as is. It doesn't look too awful in the photos, but it's pretty bad. I mean, it's not like impossible bad, but it's bad. Assuming everything goes as planned, we should be getting new appliances, which is really nice. They will all be Whirlpool "stainless look" appliances. Unfortunately, we can't afford to do anything other than that for now. But I think that alone will make it feel much nicer. We will also try to pull down the wallpaper ASAP, since it's pretty gross and is peeling in several places. The good news about the wallpaper is that it only goes to the bottom of the top cabinets. So we won't have to stand on ladders trying to strip it way up there on top of the cabinets. I've been doing a little research about removing wallpaper, and it looks pretty easy, but apparently if it's a certain type of really really old wallpaper, it's going to be really hard to take down. The pattern looks very 70's to me, kind of a gold (yes, the metallic kind), pink and brown fireworks pattern. I'm normally very into retro stuff, but it's pretty icky. It's just in bad shape in lots of parts of the kitchen, so that doesn't help its chances of sticking around. If you look in the post below about the home for sale in the neighborhood, we'd like to steal the layout they've got. Especially since we are going to have to keep the fridge in the laundry room, since the fridge cubby that's in place now is not deep enough. The fridge would stick out about ten inches and would block the entrance to what is already a tight kitchen. DH wants to knock down the top half of the wall that the stove is currently on, to make a pass through/bar that looks into the dining room. At first I agreed, but now I'm not sure. I think we'll have to live in the house for a while to figure out how we want things to flow. The more I think about it, the more I kind of like the idea of rooms being kept separate. I mean, that's what the house was like when it was built, and someone must have had reason to do it that way. The layout of the other house would be almost the exact same, and represents a much more functional use of the current space, so I'm voting with that. I think we'll have to do all of those shifts at once though, since it would make sense to replace the cabinets and the floor at the same time. I'm torn about whether or not we should paint the existing cabinets. They aren't terrible now, but the top cabinets were painted with some icky gloppy paint. Which makes me think we should probably sand and/or strip it before painting... I'm shuddering just thinking about it.

Also, I'm going to need to find the paint fairy. We're going to need a lot of it.