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