When we bought our house, it was pretty damn ugly. It was painted mauve and plum on the outside, all the rooms were mauve, plum, or a sickly pinkish-grey, and the floors were either carpeted in crappy beige builder-grade carpet, or tiled in ugly white 12x 12 tile. All the bathrooms were carpeted, too. Ugh. However, it was a nice size, it was bank-owned, (and therefore affordable), and in a great neighborhood. Before we moved in, we had the 12x12 white tiles and wee-wee stained carpet on the main floor replaced with hardwood.
But the UGLIEST and most badly-designed room in the entire house was the kitchen. It was big, but had cheap, awful, stapled-together cabinets, and not very many of them, either. I am a cook. A really, really GOOD cook. So I have pots and pans and spatulas, and myriad other gadgets. I like to entertain, too. So I have platters, and bowls, and chafing dishes.
There was a four-burner electric cooktop in the island. It sucked. Then one burner died, and another would only heat to cherry-red, which burned pots and food unless I put a thingy under the pot. I was having fits daily. Then one day, when I was complaining to my mother, she said, "I am sick and tired of hearing you complain. I'll give you the money for a new kitchen." My father had died, and left everything to my mother. So she said it was an early inheritance. My mother, BTW, hates cooking with a passion.
I had been planning a new kitchen for NINE YEARS. But somehow we ended up with three successive decks and no kitchen. I knew EXACTLY what I wanted, and where things needed to go. I was ready :) I had drawn my dream kitchen on sheets of graph paper, and measured all the walls. I planned cabinets and drawers for everything. I bought kitchen design software, but ended up hiring a designer that I found through Yelp. She translated my drawings into actual cabinets and was very patient. She worked very hard at coming up with ideas, but I had such a clear vision in my head that I just smiled and nodded, and then bought what I found on my own.
We went to the Home Show, to try and get an idea of how much cabinets cost. The tricky part was matching the kitchen to the house, which is a tract house. Having a French Provincial or other "fancy" kitchen was out of the question. It would look ridiculous. But I like clean, simple lines, anyway. And GOOD materials. Real wood. Granite. Stainless steel. No more POS crappy stapled particleboard cabinets. No more hideous bleached oak. No ugly white tile. Follow below the orange tangle of extension cord for pictures and more :) Some of the pictures were taken while the kitchen was still in progress. You can tell by the paint samples on the walls, missing hardware on some cabinets, tape on the marble trim, and a few other clues.
There are so MANY things wrong here. Those are 30" cabinets. The ceiling is 9'. The cabinets end a good two feet from the door. The cabinets behind the refrigerator are virtually inaccessible. Pot storage was nonexistent, as the cabinets were both too narrow and too shallow. And had spacers in the middle, if they were a double cabinet. Drawer space was extremely limited. There was a huge gap between the end of the drawers and the back of the cabinets. Spacers between EVERY cabinet narrowed the drawers even more. The island had sharp corners. The lighting was ghastly and didn't cover the whole kitchen.
Kitchen, long view, before. Horrible, cluttered mess.
This is the pantry wall, before, with a microwave and crappy 26" oven. The oven was too small for my big roasting pan. The slightly off-colored cabinet occupies the space of what was formerly a wine rack. I knocked out the slats with a hammer, bought two oak doors on ebay for $3.25 each, and had Guiry's paint store attempt to match the hideous pink of the neighboring cabinets. They did a pretty good job and almost succeeded :) The pantry originally had sliding doors. Drove me NUTS. So we had Home Depot make custom doors. Took them three tries to get it right, but finally we could see the entire contents of the pantry.
The pantry wall, before
This was the awful cooktop in the island
This was the "bar." Lol :)
Right before demolition, uncluttered at last
Gutted! It looks smaller, and the living room is filled with cabinets! Ack!
Gutted 2
Then the cabinets started going in. Oh HORRORS!! Due to a mismeasurement by the hapless kitchen designer, the sink did not fit in the sink cabinet! The sides of the garbage cabinet and cutting-board cabinets would have to be cruelly hacked into, and bye-bye knife and garbage-bag drawers! I had a FIT. Luckily, our brilliant if oft-disappearing contractor had a splendid idea: have the cabinetmaker make two 2" spacers, borrow some space from the right wall, and YAY!! Everything fit!
Oh FFS...
I do NOT like electric cooktops or ceramic cooktops. DH had a ceramic cooktop in his old house, but alas a spice jar fell on it and cracked it, so we had to get a gas range =) And then we moved. So we had to put in a gas line for the new range. This turned out to be tremendously complicated. But it got done. Apparently, the fact that we had a gas fireplace a few feet away did not mean that we could simply somehow tap into it, but whatever. And our HOA does not allow giant propane tanks.
I chose natural cherry cabinets. These were made by a wonderful local cabinetmaker in Denver. I will be happy to share her name and phone number through Kosmail :) They are solid wood. The boxes are maple unless they have glass doors. The glass-doored cabinets are all cherry. It was amazing to me that she was actually cheaper than semi-custom cabinets from fancy kitchen stores, cheaper than Home Depot or Lowe's, and even cheaper than the Amish cabinets, which I had planned to go with until I found her through the kitchen designer. But: no shipping costs, no salesperson commissions, etc result in a huge savings. These cabinets were completely custom-made in her shop and delivered a few pieces at a time in her pickup truck and trailer :) She also made the cabinets for two bathrooms for us.
The new pantry wall, with a microwave and 30" oven. Most of the shelves inside are pull-outs.
Pantry wall 2. There are drawers on the bottom of all the cabinets, but they don't all show in this picture.
So I took one tonight:
Here's another picture of the pantries
This is my beloved BlueStar range. Two 22k BTU burners, three 15K, and one simmer burner. I love it. And a 36" convection oven. Heaven :) I did a lot of research before deciding on the BlueStar.
Six-burner BlueStar range. ProLine range hood purchased online, 16-gauge stainless steel backsplash also purchased online
So there was all that stupid wasted space on top of the crappy 30" cabinets. I was forced to store my cookie jar collection, platters, pitchers, chafing dishes, and whatever else didn't fit in the garbage-y cabinets up there, to gather dust. I chose a waterfall glass for the new cabinets that allowed the contents to be seen, but not entirely clearly. I don't bake or eat cookies, generally, so it is a little weird that I like cookie jars. They are all empty, all the time.
Cookie jars, in their new and dust-free home
No spacers between these cabinets!
So I wanted fairly plain cabinets and simple hardware, but really stand-out granite. I looked at granite for HOURS online. I dreamed about granite. I babbled about granite to anyone who would listen. (This pool shrank rapidly.) I knew what I wanted: something BOLD. I wanted black and gold. Maybe a little cream. And I needed BIG slabs. I went all over town. DH has a client who owns a granite business. The owner, Babu, said I could go look, even though he normally does not sell directly to the public. It's a small, family-owned business. And...I found THE ONE. All three colors, plus silver. This was unfortunate, because I needed THE FOUR. But Babu said he would order more for me. I will spare you, faithful readers, the long and sordid tale of me chasing the damn granite from Brazil to California, the great disappointment of Babu upon learning that I had a fabricator (because he makes his money on the fabrication, as he told me quite candidly), the bad reviews his company got (dropped a slab in someone's driveway), and my annoyance when Babu raised the price of the granite once it arrived. (Me to my mother: "Can you believe that? What a turkey!" Mother: "Do you want that granite?" "Yes." "Then JUST PAY IT.")
The island. One 10' slab of granite, beautifully cut by a master.
So, finally it was finished. In this picture, the side panel had not yet been put on. It is on now. Well...almost finished. The undercabinet lights are not hooked up on this wall because the tile guy knocked the wire loose, and the contractor still hasn't hooked them back up. Sigh. It's been three and a half years.
New kitchen, long view. Cabinet built to fit over fish tank. Fish eaten by rude party guest, alas.
We also replaced the bar. The old one was a piece of furniture that I bought in Boston, unfinished, for my first apartment ever. It moved with me through the years, but its time was over. It last served as a TV stand until we got a console from Ikea, which I put together with relatively little swearing.
The new bar. All appliances purchased online from Brooklyn, NY.
It was amazing to me that appliance prices could vary so much. Turns out that certain manufacturers "cough" KitchenAid "cough" sell their appliances at higher prices on the West than East coast. Well, that pissed me off. So I bought the wine refrigerator and beverage fridge/freezer in the bar from Abe's in Brooklyn. With lower base prices, free shipping, and no tax, I saved several hundred dollars. It pays to do your homework :)
This is the buffet that I designed to hold the platters and big party serving dishes. It is freestanding and 42" tall.
The kitchen designer and I squabbled over this one. I designed it to hold an enormous compote dish and a platter that my brother had etched. Both pieces are about 18" in diameter, and therefore could not fit in a 12" deep cabinet. I also have some rather large bowls. And I thought that we needed a separation between the kitchen and family room. I toyed with the idea of cabinets suspended from the ceiling, but both the contractor and DH screamed, so no. When the buffet was completed, the designer admitted that it was a splendid idea :)
The sink cabinet, with garbage cabinet on the right and the cutting-board cabinet on the left.
You can see the spacers. And the pot drawers, cutting board cabinet, knife drawer, blah, blah.
There is a huge lazy Susan in the cabinet under the curve of the island.
There is no wasted space in this kitchen :)
It was worth having my old college percolator in the bathroom for coffee, and doing dishes in the laundry room.
We also remodeled two bathrooms and the basement. Next project: the basement bar. I'll be doing that all by myself. I'll need help from SMHRB :)
I have an appointment to donate blood this morning, but will check in before and after.