I would like some guidance on starting a room with hardwood flooring, taking into consideration the rest of the level that will be floored in a secondary step.

I have prepped the great room (see image below) and am ready to start laying the engineered flooring, but want to make sure i will be ok starting here, rather than in the kitchen, since the kitchen part needs to wait until we take the cabinets and island out.

my plan is to strike a reference line on the wall that divides the kitchen and great room, and go outwards to cover the great room first. then i'll use some slip tongue to go back into the kitchen area - going on both sides along other walls, hopefully with both sides of my "direction 2" meeting up on a common (theoretical) reference line once I am in the kitchen.

it seems that even though the flooring that i will lay in the 2nd direction should be consistent, so when they clear the side walls, I can lay a row across the kitchen and have everything meet up perfectly.

Unfortunately i am learning that things don't always work out like i want them to, and wanted to get the guidance of experts here who can tell me why this might not work, so I can make a better plan.

You didn't show the joist direction but theoretically you can run flooring perpendicular or parallel to joists if the joists and subfloor are of proper size.
Can you draw in the side walls and openings? Your plan will work but you may need to adjust your baselines if walls are out of square in order to not wind up having to cut very thin flooring strips at walls.

thanks for the response!

to be clear, i know the direction of the flooring is ok, and how to adjust the ref line to keep from ending up with slivers at a wall. i'll be running the courses parallel along the reference line, which is perpendicular to the joists. the white area in my image is the area to be covered, and the black area is wall.

my concern is that (for some reason), when I work my way through the narrower hallways (top and bottom in the image) back to the kitchen - to my second (theoretical) reference line, that I won't end up with a straight line from one side to the other. does that make sense?

i know ideally i'd start with the second ref line and work my way out in both directions from there, but the kitchen is not ready for that yet, and we can't as easily live with two major rooms torn up at the same time

Yes, you want to ensure that the 2 reference lines are parallel. To do this draw a right triangle or parallel perpendicular lines. You may need to temporarily move your baselines toward the outer walls to do this.

that's a great idea, except for the kitchen island that fills up the area where i would be able to measure to my second ref line...i may have to set a few more lines and do a lot of geometry to confirm.

Are there open doorways where you could draw straight parallel lines from your first baseline to you second baseline? If so and these lines are drawn at 90 degree angles between the baselines and are exactly the same length then you would know that the baselines are parallel.
Or do a right triangles at each end of the first baseline (through doorways)and connect the tips of the triangles to give you the second baseline.

below is the layout with additional obstacles included, so you can see the island prevents a connected ref line across the kitchen. maybe i should just tear the island out now (since we want it gone anyway)?

Square the 2nd baseline to the 1st baseline on both sides of the island. Draw straight lines at 90 degrees around the island to connect the imaginary 2nd baseline line through the island. Or just remove the island now.

As the kitchen area with backlaying may be a little more important alignment wise you might want to use the 2nd line as you initial baseline and then measure toward the Great room and put the reference line here to lay the flooring in the Great room.

that is what seems like the best approach...i asked my wife last night if it was ok to take out the island before we re-do the kitchen, so now i just have to come up with a temporary solution to store things once the island is gone.

If you want to leave the island in place for now get a long board and lay it to the right of the island running in the same direction as your 2 reference lines. Attach a couple of straight boards to the long board on each side of the island so that they line up on the baseline (ref line 2). Adjust this line to where you want it and then measure back toward the great room to make a second baseline parallel to the first baseline.

perfect...that is undoubtedly a more simple method than any other i had come up with yet!

one last sanity check before I start stapling things down...

i realized that the existing hardwood in the kitchen could be used as a straight line reference without taking out the island, so:
1. I picked a course to use as a reference
2. set the ref line in the kitchen using that line
3. set a square reference for each end the kitchen ref line
3. measured out 78" from both ends of the kitchen ref line to the great room
4. stretched a string across the two points in the great room
5. checked for squareness on the great room string to the two 78" ref lines

everything lines up square, so I have my string line set up to guide my placement of a reference board (to nail in place and use to back the first course up to before stapling it).

did I miss anything?

Looks good. 78" is an even multiple of floor board width? No thin strips or excessive notching at vertical obstructions e.g. walls and island when you lay the flooring from the Great Room back toward the Kitchen area? Maybe use screws to attach the reference board.

yes, boards are 6", and i chose the kitchen board cased on measuring out to all extents to avoid thin strips.

my plan is to screw down the ref board in the back room, and temporarily nail down ref boards along the other 3 lines so i can check for squareness on the all corners using actual boards (rather than just eyeballing the square along a string).

thanks again for the triple sanity check!