Kitchen Remodel: Chapter 2

The design process, part 2...

What did I say back there? "Meta-kitchen"? Like along with or beyond the kitchen? "Base-kitchen"? Like base camp? Like support or foundation? 

Yes.

I have a big room across the back of my house with a kitchen at one end and then lots of room for a table and a sofa at the other end. It's a wonderful place for a party but there is nothing to call a "Great Room" in here. And so, I needed terms to distinguish the U-shaped cabinet, appliance and counter top area, from the living-space part of the kitchen. How about Kitchen City and the Metro Kitchen Area? Lesser Kitchen and Greater Kitchen? After a fun and longish Googling of options, I came up with Base-Kitchen and Meta-Kitchen. 

Back to the design...

Practical Design Goals:

1. To fix the following little problems in my otherwise functional kitchen layout: 

                 a. The long trek from the range to pots/pans storage.  

                 b. Frustration of morning traffic jams at the coffee pot/silverware, bowls/cereal boxes. I am so tired of waiting for my husband to stir his cream and sugar while I hover, ready to lunge for my Go Lean Crunch. We live with this hellish tower, where each vital resource is stacked on top of another, and it's in a corner.

                 c.  Poor use of much storage space.  I hear people talk about The Junk Drawer, as if they only have one. Ha! I have at least four in the meta kitchen. And where do people keep all their plastic storage containers? We have a whole, difficult-to-access cabinet of them.

                   d. The uselessness of the tall and deep pantry cabinet. I don't know why it's useless; it just is.     And it creates an ugly monolith with the refrigerator. Except for the napkins, cat food and tortilla chips, it's really just one big junk drawer.

2.    To use my skills, save money and get a better kitchen than I could otherwise afford. 

       Long ago, after years of re-habbing apartment buildings, I went to design school. There, I was stymied by the lack of budgets in our interior design projects. How can you decide what to do when you don't know how much money you're allowed to spend? It's like walking without gravity. Budgets, like deadlines, force us to be creative and make decisions. 

So I almost love budgets. "Almost" because if I had the money, I would totally hand this project over to a genius-level, custom cabinet maker and together we'd Restoration Hardware the hell out of this house. And then I'd go buy at-risk houses and rehab the hell out of them.

   

The Means to Reach those Goals: 

My conundrum is that I can't afford a kitchen I would want. I can only afford Ikea and I don't want an Ikea kitchen. Except, in truth, I have always wanted an Ikea kitchen. I love them in theory. Buying each little part of your kitchen and assembling it yourself is as awesome and geeky as building a Lego Millenium Falcon.

In fact, in or around 1988, I wanted an Ikea kitchen so much that I nearly convinced a friend who does not like to drive to drive for thirteen hours with me to one of the first Ikea stores in the US. That year, my husband and I had bought an at-risk apartment building. I ended up with a kitchen or two to gut and rehab. I thought my friend (another Ellen) and I could rent a truck, drive to northern Virginia and stay with my sister in Arlington. Once there, we'd make a strategic strike on the new Potomac Mills Ikea, filling the truck with all the pieces of a new kitchen.

We needed the truck because Ikea did not deliver anything. Also, there was no internet to help with photos, information and selection. There was not much CAD drawing yet, let alone 3D kitchen design programs. And it seemed kind of risky, even likely that I'd come back without some critical components. And also, that other Ellen really did not like to drive. Plus, my husband was working 70 hour weeks and I did not have the confidence to make the quest completely on my own. I became very busy with shoveling broken plaster and killing cockroaches; finding cabinets locally was easy and boring. And then I was busy for years with landlording and refinishing wood work and then with having babies and design school and, along the way, autism and writing and stuff happened.

"There's no limit to how complicated things can get, on account of one thing always

leading to another."    -E. B. White  

And that is how my Ikea kitchen itch has remained unscratched for all these years. And yet, I still don't want an Ikea kitchen. The next post is about having it both ways

Kitchen Remodel: Chapter 1

The design process; Part one. Goals and Influences. Thank you, in advance, for your patience.

Aesthetic Goals:

1. To honor the straight-forward, vintage Craftsman style of my 1920's bungalow.











2. To combine the above with a vintage industrial style.

3.  To make this Craftsman-Industrial kitchen stylish and fresh without succumbing to the trendy excesses of the current vintage-industrial style. I don't want this kitchen to look dated in 15 years. Except, really?--probably any kitchen will look dated after 15 years. The shelter of "timeless" finishes and materials are readily available to us all, but can be adventure-less and confining. The challenge lies in using restraint with any trendy elements, such as patinated zinc and chalk-board-painted surfaces, without becoming bland. The goal is to land deftly at the midpoint between classic and sexy.

4.  To have a lot of beautiful wood and other simple, lovely materials.

5.  To create focal point and increase symmetry over the current layout.

6.  To break a few rules...because that's a basic design principle, right up there with Unity, Harmony, Emphasis and Variety. As Katherine Hepburn said,

"If you obey all the rules, you'll miss all the fun."

Aesthetic Goal Posts:

This is the kitchen that first filled my dreams.... 

Natural Alder Cabinetry by Greenfield

Natural = Unstained.

Alder = a native hardwood which is often used in place of the more expensive cherry. It is soft, as hardwoods go, and light weight compared to birch, oak and cherry. Some people consider those fatal flaws. I don't. It's not as dark as cherry and, well, just look at it! It makes my mouth water. (Synesthesia = sensory cross-over, where a stimulus enters via one sensory system but is perceived in another. I often taste what wood looks like. In my case, blame rests entirely with Jim Nickel who infected me with this wood-loving disease. But he also taught me to use power tools. Decent trade-off!

Cabinetry = boxes with doors, usually made of wood or wood-products and used for storage.

Greenfield = manufacturer of lovely custom cabinetry whose products I cannot afford.

And then there was this one...

Industrial Mix kitchen in Attic Mag

This kitchen had me absolutely convinced that I needed to have a mix of natural and gray-painted cabinets in my kitchen. I remained convinced until I started actually drawing the new kitchen. It became obvious that my kitchen lacked any problem that would be solved by varying the finishes. It would look cool for ten days and then random and pointless forever. Remember color blocked fashions?

I think I know her.

And since I already had other wood species and finishes in the meta kitchen, the base kitchen ought to remain unified in finish. Oh, well! Unity won that game. But the season has only just begun.

Kitchen Remodel Prologue: Anticipation of Catastrophe

The view from the precipice of the point of no return:

Today, I am going to pay a deposit on four hundred square feet of bamboo flooring. Hold me, please.

The journey upon which I embark will be a journey through darkness, into filth and fear as well as into tingles of desire and sighs of satisfaction. My pulse will rise and fall, but my bank account will only fall. We (my family, driven forward by me) will voluntarily descend into chaos and then claw our way back toward order.

I sometimes hear acquaintances who have comfortable stable-ish lives like mine toss off the news the they are redoing the kitchen or bathroom, as if it will just slightly inconvenience them.

“Guess we’ll be eating take-out for a month,” 

they say. Their major worry is dust. They are naive.

But I believe in stress, and that there is almost no greater stressor than home remodeling. 

If we accept the metaphor of the kitchen as the heart of the home, then this journey—the Major Kitchen Remodeling Project—is every bit as awful and treacherous as an open-heart surgery during which I will be conscious and asked to make decisions by the surgeon. 

“Hey, it’s not MY heart! You want that artery a little higher? Or lower? I’ve done them both ways. And, have you selected the color of your sutures yet?”

The intimate, physical surfaces and structures upon which I've simultaneously nurtured and emotionally stunted my children, where I've entertained my beloved friends and frayed the nerves of my patient husband—those materials will all soon vanish. No. If only this stuff would simply vanish. It must be broken. It must be sawn, hammered and pried from this home, then hauled, bagged or bundled out the door. Not a task for the soft of hand or heart. 

That Armstrong Congoleum sheet vinyl where tender feet took their first steps? Bound for the dumpster! The Merrilat cabinetry that held our very beans, both dried and canned? Can’t be saved! That “Stone Dust” Formica counter top where I chopped and chopped legions of greens, legumes and fruits, mixed birthday cake after birthday cake? Used up!

None of them are in a condition to be reused, re-purposed or recycled. The vinyl floor put up a good fight against our scraping chairs and sneakers caked with sandbox sand, but there is only so much damage that Future Acrylic Floor Finish can conceal after the glossy, top layer has worn away. And the oak cabinets were never of the best quality. The doors are splitting, the shelves warping. And sadly, that Formica laminate has been slowly de-laminating itself for over a decade. 

Many DIY advisors recommend, doing the demolition yourself but it would take days for me to carefully dismantle that kitchen. To me, it is MINE. To my general contractor (hereafter "GC") and crew, the old kitchen is an obstacle to rest of their work. They'll be quick. They will feel nothing. 

And it would be painless for me if I were the kind of person who could stay away that day.  

But I will be there. I will watch and assist when I can. It is only now, at point of commitment, as I begin ordering components of the replacement, that I tremble in anticipation of the demo.

The bids are in, the budget is set. And I will try to avoid whining. 

The main subject of this Floor Beneath My Feet blog is designing and building the new kitchen.

 I've been imagining it for years.