Selecting The Floor

A mid-demo view of the meta kitchen's
eating area.

In the beginning (circa 1925,) the floor of our house was oak in most places and maple in the original kitchen. There were walls between rooms which have long since been torn down, leaving scars behind. Those were covered in 1949 with composite tile.  In 1994, when we bought this house, we made an addition to the kitchen by enclosing the back porch. We took out the old composite tile and put sheet vinyl over the whole floor; all 390 square feet of it.

Stuart on the day the countertops were installed, 1994

Our son Stuart was a year old back then. At first, his baby sitter teased me for damp mopping it every two or three evenings. She said I was in love with my floor. But it was so easy to clean! It looked so clean and shiny afterwards! Can you blame be for getting a little mop-happy? Years of high-drama, tracked-in sand box sand, street grit and serious chair-scraping lay ahead for that vinyl.

Reuse, Reduce, Recycle

Floors are like any other part of a building. The most environmentally responsible option is always keeping what you have. It may sound like tearing down a 20th century house to build an energy efficient, solar-and-wind powered house out of sustainably sourced products is a fabulously green plan. It is not. There is a tremendous amount of energy stored in that old house. Even disassembling and recycling the building materials consumes a huge amount of energy. It is almost always greener to remodel and retro-fit the old house. I'm not saying, "Never tear down an old house!" I would never judge someone harshly for doing anything so completely wonderful and exciting as building a brand new LEED certified home.  Just don't kid yourself. New houses create an unavoidable environmental debt. Old houses have long-since paid off that debt and they get a little greener every day you live in one.

Armstrong Congoleum Vinyl, 1994-2014

Pardon my Digression. Back to the Floor...

So with an old floor, you can buff or sand it if it's hardwood; strip, scrub and buff if it's tile or a composite. But some floors can't be saved. Not only had our family sucked the useful life out of our kitchen floor, the foot print of the cabinets was going to change with the remodeling, exposing areas that had never had vinyl flooring. Keeping the existing flooring was out for me.

The next greenest flooring is a recycled material such as recycled rubber or reclaimed wood. After that, probably comes linoleum. which has long been made of linseed oil, rosin, powdered cork and pigments pressed into a jute backing. While largely replaced by and confused with composite vinyl flooring since the 1940's, linoleum is still made and sold under the brand names of Marmoleum and Marmorette. All last winter, I was convinced we'd install a linoleum floor in our kitchen.

A truly fine linoleum installation.

I researched online. I visited showrooms and talked to showroom guys about the installation process and costs for linoleum. I eventually sussed-out that installers don't really want to lay tile or sheet flooring with adhesive any more. They'd much rather install a floating floor where the pieces click together. It's faster and easier for them. One show room guy was postively gleeful about how quick and simple it was. And since the consumer pays the same installation fee per square foot, I completely understand why he was gleeful: Lower labor costs and higher profits. But what's in it for me? The estimate he gave me for either a glued-down, linoleum tile floor, or a floating, linoleum click-floor was $5,000. That's a lot. It seemed like I'd do better elsewhere.

Back to the Interwebs!

Maybe now is the time to let you know about two critical factors in my flooring search.

The First Factor: Clearance

 As I mentioned some time ago, last summer I stripped and refinished all of the interior doors on the main floor of our house. One of those is a swinging door between the kitchen and the dining room.

Swinging doors are hinged with pins at the top and bottom edges. The pins fit into plates in the top of the door jamb and in the floor. That dirty metal plate around the bottom, hinged side of the door (visible in the mid-stripping photo above, right,) conceals a spring mechanism that allows the door to SWING, SWING, swing, swing and come to rest in the closed position. You can see why the door can't be cut and made shorter to accommodate a thicker floor, right? You can't cut either the top or the bottom of the door. The door above could swing into the kitchen and clear the quarter inch of underlayment and the 3/16th of the sheet vinyl on the floor with maybe another quarter inch to spare. Therefore, a thicker, click-floor wouldn't work in this room; not with the door there. And I would never sacrifice that door. Repeating those facts seemed to make no impression on the salesman who tried to sell me his click flooring products. Every time I mentioned the swinging door clearance issue he waved his hand, as if this was a mere detail his installation crew would easily solve. He could not explain how. I walked out laughing.

The only solution I could think of was to remove the original maple and oak flooring in the entire kitchen, take out the plywood under the floor in the addition and somehow make all that level. But if I were going to pay for all that, I could put down any flooring I wanted. And if I was going to pay for all that, the floor I would select was going to be very, very strong.

The Second Factor: Sledgehammers in Sneakers

If you didn't know me before this blog then you probably don't know that Stuart has autism. I wish there was a shorthand way for us to smile and nod at each other and move on to his effect on floors. Briefly: He's 21 years old now and he is, as he has always been, my beloved, funny, charming kid. Yes, he's happy and doing well Yes, we had to face the challenges of finding therapy, schooling and services for him. No, we did not get much sleep during his childhood. I've written about him and my experiences as his mother elsewhere. No, he did not "progress" in therapy as much as we hoped he would, but we have been extremely fortunate in finding good support and services for him with PACTT Learning Center. Hey, look! Here's my favorite photo of Stuart:

And here's a link to a PACTT video about the need for support and services for him and his friends.

Like a lot of people with autism, intense emotions such as frustration, disappointment and even pure excitement can overwhelm Stuart. Sometimes, despite his best efforts to control himself, he releases the emotions loudly, energetically and physically with destructive force. He's much better at controlling himself than he once was, but these outbursts of behavior are still a defining condition of his life. He used to do a lot of damage to walls, and he still can, but he tries to avoid that by jumping, with feet spread apart and knees bent, like a sumo-wrestler, bringing his feet down as hard as he can. Sledgehammers in sneakers. I need a floor that can take it.

Pardon my digression, again.

Selecting Bamboo Flooring for Resilience

Ultimately, bamboo flooring beat all the others. It's harder and more sustainably produced than traditional hardwoods such as maple and oak. Except, in my research, I found that that the issues of durability and "green-ness" of the product were complicated.. I highly recommend taking the time to do research and  paying the small cost of buying samples. These were important factors in my decision. Here's some of what I learned:

1.  Most bamboo plank flooring sold in the US is grown and manufactured in China where forests have been cut down to grow our bamboo.
2.  Most bamboo from China has formaldehyde added in the manufacturing process. .
3. Types of plank bamboo in order of increasing durability: Carbonized, Horizontal Grain,Vertical Grain,  and Strand bamboo.
4. The quality of bamboo flooring varies between manufacturers. The cheap stuff is not just-as-good as the more expensive stuff. That's why buying samples is so important. 
5. Since bamboo is a grass, all bamboo flooring material is composed of bamboo held together by resins. By itself, the only really hard part of bamboo is the outside of the stalk. Stranded bamboo flooring (or "strand-woven" ) is made from separated fibers of bamboo combined with those tough resins and compressed into an extremely dense plank. It is the hardest, most resilient, bamboo flooring.

It turns out that buying a good floor is a lot like love: When it's right, you just know it. When I held Cali Bamboo's strand-woven bamboo in my hand and compared it with two comparable products, it was the obvious winner. It was heavier, denser and better-finished. The tongues and the grooves were smoother. It still took many calls and questions to Cali Bamboo's salesman, and many months for me to commit. You know how love is: Scary as hell!

Catching up in the kitchen.

Oh my. It has been a long while.

As soon as the actual construction started on May 19th, my everyday routine became a race. Not like a marathon where you do the whole thing in one day, but more like the Tour de France with daily stages to complete. But holy crap, those mountains! I couldn't keep up.

L>R: Backlog, Ongoing, Clean-up, Complete

My mistake was thinking I could do my portions of the work in the mornings before the contractor's crew arrived and in the evenings after they left. Trouble was, in between patching and painting walls at dawn or assembling cabinetry after dark, I did not slow down and rest in the middle of the day. After a month of working from 5 a.m. until 9 p.m. on weekdays, and long days on the weekends, I wiped out. I lost a week to an illness; a major body infection. You do not want the details. I had to slow down. And that's how this blog fell off my Kanban Board.

By now, the base kitchen has been functioning for a month. Although there are still ongoing projects. I'm about to install reclaimed wood shelves in the meta kitchen. And the wall colors in the dining room and adjacent bathroom are all wrong with the new kitchen; I'll have to repaint them very soon.  But I have survived, and my children and husband are still alive, so let's declare victory and catch-up on what happened, starting with the floor.

Arbitrary whimsy? Not in my house.

My husband has chosen to have almost zero influence in the design of the new kitchen. When I ask him weigh-in I try saying something like: "I was looking at both this one and that one but I'm going to get that one because...blah blah blah blah blah."

He replies that either choice is fine with him since he can't tell the difference between them anyway. 

Then, of course, we indulge in a tediously familiar discussion of how a human being could even honestly be that imperceptive, and how the species could never have survived with such a limited ability to discriminate between surfaces, or colors or tones. I hate it when he is intentionally agreeable. It drives me into a seething state. And yet he simply reiterates that he wishes to be left out of all decisions, with these caveats:

No visible-filament bulbs!

No open shelving or clear glass doors!

And I will add one of my one to those: No arbitrary whimsy!

 As I mentioned in a previous post, I spent a month or so of this past long, dark winter violently in love with the idea of mixing natural, wood cabinets with painted cabinets. Then I got over it.

Usually in mixed finish kitchens, a primary cabinet finish is chosen to cover, for example, the cabinets around the perimeter of the room. A secondary finish is chosen for the cabinetry of the island (for example) or for the wall cabinets above the base cabinets.

Lovely mix of gray and white cabinet finishes.

The choices are made logically, adding a pleasing variety, avoiding any arbitrary whimsy.

(I just Google searched for images of bad arbitrary whimsy and came up with zilch. It all looked good, reminding me that arbitrary whimsy is great as a design goal except in permanent, functional interiors which reference any historical style other than "Mid-Century Hippy" and even then...if you really want it, and are willing to make the necessary sacrifices, you can probably make it work. YOU can. I still find that this decade's "whimsy" always seems to turn into next decade's "crap-I-am-sick-of-looking-at." So I'll keep my whimsy restricted to wall paint and throw pillows )

Still thinking about it: 

As hard as I tried, I honestly could not find an actual REASON to mix finishes in my cabinets. Besides, my new kitchen was always going to have a mix of finishes anyway. Our 15-year-old natural maple table and the natural birch sideboard will remain in the meta kitchen. Very light natural woods, there. Medium light wood, here.

So, in the base kitchen with all of those cabinet doors, where does the variety reside?

In the structure.

During my fevered passion for mixing finishes, I eventually realized that three divisions, or "blocks" of cabinets already exist within my wall cabinets. Those blocks are structures that can be employed to disrupt the dull, wrap-around-cabinet-cocoon feeling of the current kitchen or as I call it...

The Pale Oaken Death March

Wait, what? You don't notice any separate blocks of wall cabinets? Just the cabinet tops lined up at the same height, all the way around the room? Indeed. That is what we need to fix.

Let's define those divisions from left to right:

Block One, over the range, forms a nicely proportioned rectangle. It stay pretty much as it is, changing the least of the three blocks.

Block Two takes up the west wall (the far wall in the photo, above.) It includes the cabinets on each side of the window and the cabinets adjoining them on the south and north walls. This block will become the focal point of the base kitchen by the power of symmetry, end-wall placement, and height.


Block Three on the north wall consists of the fridge and its side panels, the cabinet above the fridge and the cabinets on the right side of the fridge. That pantry cabinet in the photo will be replaced by a base cabinet and a wall cabinet above which will be reoriented 90 degrees to face toward the east, sort of facing into the entrance of the kitchen from the hall. This will be our coffee station and also, hopefully, a landing spot for dishes going to and from the dining room. It will only be four square feet of counter space, one of which will always be occupied by the coffee maker, so I will try not to expect it to do everything.

Arriving at the Ikea/Custom Cabinet Distribution.

Using all Ikea cabinets and doors would have been easiest. All Ikea cabinets with all custom doors would have been easy, too. Except, Ikea cabinets (the boxes) are only made in a limited number of stock sizes and there was no way to stack those boxes to achieve a classic to-the-ceiling arrangement. I made the first design using Ikea boxes for the base cabinets and Scherr's ready-to-assemble custom cabinets for all of the wall cabinets. I sent that design out, and got Scherr's quote back in two days. TOO MUCH MONEY!

Allow me to emphasize again that this whole kitchen is supposed to be one of those shoe-string budget, value-engineered miracles. These cabinets are a very good value. I just don't have that much money for cabinets in this new kitchen.  We are also replacing all 400 square feet of floor, taking everything down to the the subfloor and installing new wood on top. I will explain all that when there are photos to post

So I redesigned. (I also redesigned the crown-molding, but that will be its own post.) Ultimately, I ordered custom cabinets for Block Two, my focal point  and Ikea cabinets for Blocks One and Three, and for the base cabinets, as originally planned. The differences may be visible, but I am hoping that they will look neither arbitrary nor whimsical.

Block Two

Having it Both Ways

Ikea kitchens are awesome...

 ....and they're also crap.

 As with almost all Ikea products, the most awesome feature of an Ikea kitchen is their value in design and function for the price.

Drawers

Ikea cabinets come with Blum hinges, metal drawers, drawer glides and other hardware. This German manufacturer has been making these products for decades. They are in use all over the world in high-end cabinetry. Can you open a drawer in these cabinets to admire the warm glow and craftsmanship of a dovetailed wooden box?

No, you can't. But I can't afford those dovetails and wasn't planning to leave my drawers open, any how. These metal boxes are durable and practical.

Particle Board

Some people think that Ikea cabinets (and their other furniture) are crap because the boxes (top, bottom, sides) and shelves are made of particle board and not plywood. Now, hold on! There are quality grades for particle board and for plywood. A decent quality of either material will make a plenty-strong box with plenty of screw-holding ability. I will spare you the dusty details. For me, it's a fair trade-off for the price. In fact, if I were building a modern kitchen with glossy, flat doors, I'd buy everything from Ikea, including the doors.

Doors

Except, as I mentioned in another post, I love wood. I love it this much:

 I spent last summer on my front porch, refinishing my interior doors.

Totally worth it!

I cannot love Ikea's wooden doors because they are crappy wooden doors. The solid wood is not solid enough; the veneers over the door panels and all other panels are remarkably thin. And the finishes are not good. Trust me. It's hard to see in photos, but what they do to wood and wood products is roughly equivalent to what McDonald's does to chicken. 

I understand that most people would be happy with these. Ikea has designed doors which are homogeneous, reasonably sturdy and (above all) easy to manufacture and sell in ginormous quantities.That is their specialty. Hey Ikea, you big, wicked smart, good-looking Swede! Well done!

I just can't put these crappy doors in my house. I'm after more of a heritage-breed, free-range kind of a bird.

Alternative Doors

Happily, I found others of my kind: people who both wanted and did not want an Ikea kitchen. It turns out that lots of companies cater to us by making high-quality doors to fit Ikea cabinet boxes. Just a few names here:

• Semihandmade
• Barker Door
• Kokeena
• Scherr's Cabinet and Doors

After weeks of fevered web surfing, emails and a couple of phone calls, I bought sample doors from Scherr's and loved them. Of course, this is going to cost more than going with those ginormously mass produced Ikea doors, but not all that much more. And it will still save money over any cabinets available at the big box stores. 

 Next post: how and why that saved money has been spent on "just a few" custom cabinets from Scherr's.

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.