Kitchen Generator I
A kitchen is the first room in this series where the furniture can’t move. The room studies up to here worked out what a room needs, how its pieces arrange, how much clearance each one keeps and where the outlets land, and they did it in plan, with floor to shuffle things around on. A kitchen bolts nearly everything to one wall run. That changes the problem twice over: every appliance becomes a width subtracted from a fixed length, and every appliance gets neighbors it can’t walk away from. So the first kitchen generator is deliberately dumb. It is a one-dimensional kitchen configurator with pre-baked adjacency logic: one line, five kinds of things, two rules. Check items in the drawing and watch the cabinets pay for them.
What stays fixed
The wall is 12 feet, 144 inches, and it never changes. The appliances come in at fixed illustrative widths: fridge 36″, sink 30″, dishwasher 24″, range 30″. Those are the widths the rebuilt Kitchen IV model uses, not numbers from this post, and they aren’t gospel: Kitchen III’s solver figure draws a 33″ sink. My original had eight equal slots and no dimensions at all. Whatever you check lines up left to right in one fixed order, fridge, sink, dishwasher, range, and the flexible cabinet takes the rest of the wall. Casework, for anyone who skipped Cabinets I, is just the built-in cabinetry: the lorem ipsum of building interiors.
The two rules are fixed too, carried over from the original: no fridge beside the range, and no dishwasher beside the range. The post stated them and never argued for them. Treat them as house rules, not a code or safety determination.
What you change
Five checkboxes. Four are appliances. The fifth, Flexible cabinet, decides whether the leftover wall becomes casework or stays bare. Four cards move with them: selected appliances, appliance span, flexible casework and adjacency conflicts. When an appliance lands beside a forbidden neighbor, it gets a heavy orange outline.
The opening example checks fridge, sink and dishwasher: 36 + 30 + 24 = 90″ of appliances, so 144 − 90 = 54″ of cabinet and zero conflicts. Add the range and the span goes to 120″. The casework drops to 24″, exactly one 24″ base cabinet from Cabinets I’s 18–36″ family. The conflict card goes from 0 to 1 on the same click, because the range lands right next to the dishwasher. The dishwasher-and-range example makes the same point with less in the way: 24 + 30 = 54″ of appliances, 90″ of casework, one conflict. Clear everything but the cabinet and you get 144″ of casework and nothing to argue with. Uncheck the cabinet as well and the casework card reads 0 while the wall stays 144″. The leftover is just empty wall, which is a kitchen in the same sense that a parking lot is a building.
What to notice
Both rules are about the range. The fridge, sink and dishwasher get along with everybody; the range is the only appliance with enemies. In a single run, its only legal neighbors are a sink, a cabinet or the end of the wall.
The checklist can’t act on that. It only subtracts. With all four appliances checked, its fixed order parks the dishwasher beside the range and the card says 1, even though range, sink, dishwasher, fridge passes both rules. Same four appliances, same 120″, same 24″ of casework; only the order changed. Width tells you whether a kitchen fits. Order tells you whether it works.
The original example
The original version did the other half. It started with eight slots, had buttons to add or remove one, and offered the same five types on a palette. My instructions were: “Select an element from the palette, then click a slot to place it. Invalid adjacencies are flagged in red.” Build range, sink, dishwasher, fridge in it and it passed. What it couldn’t tell you was whether that kitchen fits, because every slot was the same width: the fridge and the dishwasher took identical space. The original checked neighbors and ignored width. The rebuilt drawing checks width and freezes the order. Neither one is a kitchen generator on its own.
The judgment
In a kitchen, the appliances are requirements and the cabinets are slack. Fridge, sink, dishwasher and range arrive with their widths decided. The casework is whatever the wall has left, and it is the only thing on the run that can flex to make the math close. So a kitchen generator isn’t really choosing appliances. It orders the fixed pieces so the range has no enemies beside it, then designs the leftover. That leftover is what the rest of this series spends its time on.