When we were looking at this house initially there were several things going on that would have been enough for me to pass, so maybe calling the kitchen the deal breaker is not perfectly accurate, however it definitely was a deal breaker as evidenced in the following pictures.
The North wall, or should I say half wall, providing a view into the family room down stairs. This must have been quite the innovation in 1980 but it really serves no purpose other than being weird.
The East wall included the sliding glass door to the deck (not shown) and the sink. Note the little peninsula thing sticking out into the middle of the room which was so poorly designed that only about a third of it could be used. The rest was recessed so far back into the cabinet a person would have to crawl back into it with a flashlight to find anything stored in it.
The fridge was on the South wall along with a small doorway to the dining room. The corner cabinet on this side suffered from the same design flaw as the other side in that there was so much dead space it was basically unusable. Also, our fridge stuck out so far we couldn't open the door to the dishwasher. So far we have a lot of weirdness and bad design.
On the West wall was the stove and tiny panty. It actually was not a horrible looking kitchen (aside from the original counters which were in fact horrible) but the cabinets were built with something akin to pressboard. Most of it was warped and rickety, the face frames were coming loose and the drawers had super sloppy hardware. It was livable but coming from the custom kitchen in our last home I told Jim this house would not be my first pick. He said "no problem, we'll just remodel it".
