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Final Review Part 1
So, we come to the close of a first time kitchen renovation. This was quite a learning experience. I started with a 1978 kitchen that had been only very modestly updated since Jimmy Carter was in office. And that update, appliances in the 90’s, was not very in synch with the rest of the house. The basic style was 180 degrees away from our own. It was everything we didn’t want. Dark. Country. Busy. And of course, crumbling apart since it was low quality from the outset. Other than that, it was perfect…
Ergonomics? Well, not completely terrible (I have lived with some true horror show kitchens, especially in city apartments), but not very easy to move around in and eat in. Let’s start with a peninsula that was too large to let traffic flow and French doors that opened into the eat-in dining area. Then there was the swinging door into the dining room proper, also in conflict with the eat in area. Lots of table bumping and moving on a daily basis.
And the lovely fake wooden beams. Four of them. In dark and rough wood. The room also had soffits on top of all the cabinets, closing the space in tremendously. The dark wood cabinets certainly didn’t help either. To top things off, the built in pantry was just a closet with shelves, and wasted lots of floor space. It would make me shudder to discuss the details of the wallpaper and border, let’s just say it was not to our taste and leave it at that.
Lighting was abysmal. Two ceiling locations for hanging lights, and two cans built into the soffits. This was not enough lumens to counteract the darkness of this space. Natural light was limited to only a small double window over the sink, and a French door that had a very large portico type roof outside it – blocking the sun thoroughly. Of course the beams helped trap light from making it too far from the ceiling fixtures as a bonus.
The floor wasn’t too bad – it was 12x12 ceramic tile. However, it had been done long after the cabinets had been in place, and would not survive any change in floor plan. The size of the space wasn’t terrible either, it just had all the wrong design elements at play to use the space properly.
So what is a poor family to do? When we moved into the house in 2002, we had the cabinets painted bright white, and the scary wallpaper stripped off and the room painted a light yellow. This helped a LOT, but was only a stopgap until “someday soon” when we would update the kitchen. Other things beckoned in the house, some driven by a very new family member who arrived in 2004. So while the basement got finished off (a whole ‘nuther adventure), the kitchen had to live with a (new to us) fridge update and the occasional touch up paintwork. I did a trial run of kitchen remodeling by building a bar, with sink and fridge, in our four season room. This did prove that Ikea cabinets were easy to work with and they held up to our six person household just fine. But this proved to be a very simple job compared to the kitchen remodel to come.
So what did we do? We planned the remodel on an occasional basis for more than a year, this really was around the basic questions of cabinet configuration. A few radical options were discussed, like taking down the wall between the dining room and kitchen, but these did not make the final design. We moved the appliance all around, tried island configurations and such. And after all this discussion and modeling, the winning design was….. very similar to what we already had. The sink, fridge and cooking surfaces all stayed in the same 1978 locations. And the peninsula cabinet configuration also was retained. H’mm – what is old is new again. At least I didn’t have to move the plumbing!
However, some real changes were made to the big picture. The size of the room was expanded an additional 56 square feet by enclosing in the aforementioned portico roof, which also allowed for a sliding door instead of a French style. This modest addition provided much needed natural light as well, since we installed the largest floor to ceiling windows that could be fit in the new walls. We also changed the door configuration into the dining room, by installing a pocket door instead of a swing door. And we ditched the “range” and went with a cooktop and wall oven approach, and located the wall ovens on the same wall as the fridge. But one of the biggest changes was what we took out – the, pantry closet, soffits and “beams”. This opened the room up tremendously.
So how did we do this? First, we did our floorspace planning in the Ikea provided software, which made changing our minds fairly easy, and helped to quickly estimate the costs of the cabinets. Once that was somewhat established, I used a spreadsheet to enter all the costs outside the Ikea purchase, including tools and other materials. This was the “reality check” phase where some items just didn’t meet the budget, such as radiant floor heating. From the start, we found that to meet our expectations for green features and cost, we could not use contractors for the project, and ultimately only broke that rule once for our backsplash. We also were not impressed with the potential contractors we had used in the past, and wanted quality workmanship by someone who “cared” about the final product. So the project was going to be done by the husband contractor service.
We had a few prerequisites, the first being concrete work to replace a patio outside the kitchen. This concrete was going to be used as a slab foundation for the small addition on the kitchen. The concrete was finally poured in January of 2008. Once cured, I began the construction of the addition, which required special ordering the windows and door (Pella from Lowes). This was a time consuming little addition, since the I had never framed out anything, let alone installed windows, and the house had bevel cedar siding that was tricky to install. I also had to add substantial water management (gutters) to an existing roof used for the addition, and tie this into a perimeter drain on the patio. Once this was weathertight in April 2008, I removed the French doors into the kitchen and welcomed the new space. This area immediately became the “toolshed” for the larger power tools like the table saw.
After removing the door, I took a good look at the opening into the house from the addition. I knew that if we retained the existing opening, the space would “narrow” crossing into the new area. And this was a bearing wall so simply widening the opening was not going to work. So I took a trip to the local steelyard and purchased a sheet of 7” x ½” steel bar and sandwiched this with 2” x 8” lumber to create an “engineered beam” to span the opening and eliminate the intrusions. This was fun to install since I had to brace up the ceiling inside the house using steel posts while we removed the old header, took out the studs and installed the new header and supports. This required the help of a neighbor to move the beam around, as it was quite heavy once assembled. After installed, we had gained about 3” on each side of the opening, and the look was much cleaner. Quite a lot of work to gain a half foot on the opening!
I sourced a 36” bow front stainless steel farm sink from a seller on Ebay. It was less than half the price of a comparable unit from name brand manufacturers, but several thousand positive feedback ratings gave us confidence. When it arrived in a few days, we were quite pleased with the quality and appearance.
Time to go to Ikea. I rented a U-Haul extended cargo van and took the final plan to Ikea in Philadelphia on a weekday. I had read about how to try and deal with the purchasing process on Ikeafans.com, and tried to be prepared as much as possible. The ordering process was surprisingly easy, and I added a 36” Range Hood to the order (for later delivery) after seeing it in person. The ordering might have been easy, but loading the van was another matter. The van ended up being full from floor to ceiling, front to back with $7K worth of Ikea cabinets. It took eight carts to bring the order to the van from the pickup area in the store. Once I started rolling, the van did pretty well, but you really _knew_ all that weight was back there! After making the one hour trip home, the van was unloaded into a single bay of our two car garage, and filled that up quite nicely. It looked like an awful lot of assembly was going to be required.
Time to go shopping again. We needed 370 square feet of tile for the kitchen floor. I decided to tile the entire floor since this simplified the tile installation and gave us the most freedom to adjust cabinet locations if needed. This turned out to be a good move. Lowes had a porcelain floor tile that was in terra cotta style, and after a somewhat frightening trip in the trusty but very overloaded Jeep Cherokee I had a pallet full of tile on the back patio. A local lumberyard delivered a big stack of ½” concrete backerboard and many bags of thinset.
It was now the third week in April. Time to destroy the floor. The ceramic tile was smashed with a sledgehammer, one tile at a time. Sounds like fun but isn’t, that tile is tough. Under the tile I found a bed of thinset in wire mesh that had to be smashed and removed. Many wheelbarrow trips to the dumpster in the driveway. Under that I found another layer of asbestos backed vinyl flooring in a lovely red brick pattern, with ¼” plywood underlayment, installed with what seemed like millions of nails. Time to wear a respirator and make many more dumpster trips. Under _that_ I found yet another asbestos backed vinyl floor (in very dark brown) with another layer of ¼” plywood underlayment, with another one million nails. Cannot take off the respirator yet. Finally, after a long second day the base plywood for the floor was located. Much fun time with a nail puller ensued getting all the nail gun nails out of this plywood, and in many cases I found just pounding them in flush was easier.
So up to now, we had a fully functioning (if messy) kitchen for the family. But the next step was going to change all that. On April 26th, I hired the neighbor’s teenage boy and got down to the serious demolition. The cabinets came out quite easily in only a few hours. The water was turned off, the sink removed and the supply lines capped shut. We then attacked the beams, soffits and pantry cabinet, which were made from studs and drywall. Amazingly, we had all the space wasting parts removed by the late afternoon, and started putting a few pieces of drywall up the same day! Since this was the first time both the neighbor boy and I had ever hung drywall, it was the blind leading the blind. But these few pieces were only done as a feel good effort, since much work electrical remained before patching up the soffit areas.
There were a few appliances deliberately left in the kitchen at this time, the electric range and the fridge. These, along with a long suffering Ikea table, would be the tools my wife would use to keep cooking meals. I had installed a small bar sink in our “test project” bar, and this was the only kitchen sink available now. Unfortunately, the bar sink only offered cold water and no garbage disposal, so washing pans was mostly an outdoor activity with the hose, which our teenage daughter loathed.
The phase we entered now was “prepare, prepare, prepare”. The space needed quite a lot of electrical work, since the soffits had been used to carry power wires all over instead of using the walls. In addition, the wall oven location required a new 30 amp 220v circuit, and a “beverage bar” area would also require additional 20 amp 110v circuits for two fridges and espresso making machinery. There was also additional lighting preparation required. So several days of electrical rearranging occurred, culminating with the removal of some flooring and the running of new lines to the electrical closet in the basement. Since the current electrical panel was full, a new subpanel box was installed and the additional circuits connected to this, which added research, shopping and time with main breaker off to the project. I took the opportunity to run cable TV and phone/network wiring to the bar as well, you never know when that might come in handy. I am an engineer and not afraid of the electrical system. This was a good thing, since more would end up coming my way!
Once the electrical was complete, I installed the vent hood ductwork. Like so many kitchens, our previous “vent” was the recirculation type. Since the ceiling was ripped open, this was the perfect time to add a real vent. This required drilling a 6” hole in the side of the house, installing a vent cap outside and hanging ductwork inside. The ductwork was not fun to deal with, especially cutting it properly. But after laying out the cabinet locations on the wall, the duct was hung and installed. An amusing side note here, the original range from 1978 must have had a downdraft vent, as we found a duct under the range inside the floor leading to the outside. The outlet for this duct was now covered with concrete, so no worries about air leaking in there!
Our original plan had the dining room door retained as is, but the thought of a pocket door here kept coming up. So, after a little research a Johnson Hardware pocket door kit and new door were purchased locally. The trick with this install was that the dining room wall was finished and had a chair rail installed – so I did not want to remove that. So I very carefully removed the drywall and studs from the kitchen side and left the drywall intact (but almost completely unsupported) on the dining room side. I then framed out the pocket door and installed the door kit, which consisted mostly of an aluminum rail like you might find in a closet on which the door was hung. Final finishing on this door would have to wait until the end of the project.
Ergonomics? Well, not completely terrible (I have lived with some true horror show kitchens, especially in city apartments), but not very easy to move around in and eat in. Let’s start with a peninsula that was too large to let traffic flow and French doors that opened into the eat-in dining area. Then there was the swinging door into the dining room proper, also in conflict with the eat in area. Lots of table bumping and moving on a daily basis.
And the lovely fake wooden beams. Four of them. In dark and rough wood. The room also had soffits on top of all the cabinets, closing the space in tremendously. The dark wood cabinets certainly didn’t help either. To top things off, the built in pantry was just a closet with shelves, and wasted lots of floor space. It would make me shudder to discuss the details of the wallpaper and border, let’s just say it was not to our taste and leave it at that.
Lighting was abysmal. Two ceiling locations for hanging lights, and two cans built into the soffits. This was not enough lumens to counteract the darkness of this space. Natural light was limited to only a small double window over the sink, and a French door that had a very large portico type roof outside it – blocking the sun thoroughly. Of course the beams helped trap light from making it too far from the ceiling fixtures as a bonus.
The floor wasn’t too bad – it was 12x12 ceramic tile. However, it had been done long after the cabinets had been in place, and would not survive any change in floor plan. The size of the space wasn’t terrible either, it just had all the wrong design elements at play to use the space properly.
So what is a poor family to do? When we moved into the house in 2002, we had the cabinets painted bright white, and the scary wallpaper stripped off and the room painted a light yellow. This helped a LOT, but was only a stopgap until “someday soon” when we would update the kitchen. Other things beckoned in the house, some driven by a very new family member who arrived in 2004. So while the basement got finished off (a whole ‘nuther adventure), the kitchen had to live with a (new to us) fridge update and the occasional touch up paintwork. I did a trial run of kitchen remodeling by building a bar, with sink and fridge, in our four season room. This did prove that Ikea cabinets were easy to work with and they held up to our six person household just fine. But this proved to be a very simple job compared to the kitchen remodel to come.
So what did we do? We planned the remodel on an occasional basis for more than a year, this really was around the basic questions of cabinet configuration. A few radical options were discussed, like taking down the wall between the dining room and kitchen, but these did not make the final design. We moved the appliance all around, tried island configurations and such. And after all this discussion and modeling, the winning design was….. very similar to what we already had. The sink, fridge and cooking surfaces all stayed in the same 1978 locations. And the peninsula cabinet configuration also was retained. H’mm – what is old is new again. At least I didn’t have to move the plumbing!
However, some real changes were made to the big picture. The size of the room was expanded an additional 56 square feet by enclosing in the aforementioned portico roof, which also allowed for a sliding door instead of a French style. This modest addition provided much needed natural light as well, since we installed the largest floor to ceiling windows that could be fit in the new walls. We also changed the door configuration into the dining room, by installing a pocket door instead of a swing door. And we ditched the “range” and went with a cooktop and wall oven approach, and located the wall ovens on the same wall as the fridge. But one of the biggest changes was what we took out – the, pantry closet, soffits and “beams”. This opened the room up tremendously.
So how did we do this? First, we did our floorspace planning in the Ikea provided software, which made changing our minds fairly easy, and helped to quickly estimate the costs of the cabinets. Once that was somewhat established, I used a spreadsheet to enter all the costs outside the Ikea purchase, including tools and other materials. This was the “reality check” phase where some items just didn’t meet the budget, such as radiant floor heating. From the start, we found that to meet our expectations for green features and cost, we could not use contractors for the project, and ultimately only broke that rule once for our backsplash. We also were not impressed with the potential contractors we had used in the past, and wanted quality workmanship by someone who “cared” about the final product. So the project was going to be done by the husband contractor service.
We had a few prerequisites, the first being concrete work to replace a patio outside the kitchen. This concrete was going to be used as a slab foundation for the small addition on the kitchen. The concrete was finally poured in January of 2008. Once cured, I began the construction of the addition, which required special ordering the windows and door (Pella from Lowes). This was a time consuming little addition, since the I had never framed out anything, let alone installed windows, and the house had bevel cedar siding that was tricky to install. I also had to add substantial water management (gutters) to an existing roof used for the addition, and tie this into a perimeter drain on the patio. Once this was weathertight in April 2008, I removed the French doors into the kitchen and welcomed the new space. This area immediately became the “toolshed” for the larger power tools like the table saw.
After removing the door, I took a good look at the opening into the house from the addition. I knew that if we retained the existing opening, the space would “narrow” crossing into the new area. And this was a bearing wall so simply widening the opening was not going to work. So I took a trip to the local steelyard and purchased a sheet of 7” x ½” steel bar and sandwiched this with 2” x 8” lumber to create an “engineered beam” to span the opening and eliminate the intrusions. This was fun to install since I had to brace up the ceiling inside the house using steel posts while we removed the old header, took out the studs and installed the new header and supports. This required the help of a neighbor to move the beam around, as it was quite heavy once assembled. After installed, we had gained about 3” on each side of the opening, and the look was much cleaner. Quite a lot of work to gain a half foot on the opening!
I sourced a 36” bow front stainless steel farm sink from a seller on Ebay. It was less than half the price of a comparable unit from name brand manufacturers, but several thousand positive feedback ratings gave us confidence. When it arrived in a few days, we were quite pleased with the quality and appearance.
Time to go to Ikea. I rented a U-Haul extended cargo van and took the final plan to Ikea in Philadelphia on a weekday. I had read about how to try and deal with the purchasing process on Ikeafans.com, and tried to be prepared as much as possible. The ordering process was surprisingly easy, and I added a 36” Range Hood to the order (for later delivery) after seeing it in person. The ordering might have been easy, but loading the van was another matter. The van ended up being full from floor to ceiling, front to back with $7K worth of Ikea cabinets. It took eight carts to bring the order to the van from the pickup area in the store. Once I started rolling, the van did pretty well, but you really _knew_ all that weight was back there! After making the one hour trip home, the van was unloaded into a single bay of our two car garage, and filled that up quite nicely. It looked like an awful lot of assembly was going to be required.
Time to go shopping again. We needed 370 square feet of tile for the kitchen floor. I decided to tile the entire floor since this simplified the tile installation and gave us the most freedom to adjust cabinet locations if needed. This turned out to be a good move. Lowes had a porcelain floor tile that was in terra cotta style, and after a somewhat frightening trip in the trusty but very overloaded Jeep Cherokee I had a pallet full of tile on the back patio. A local lumberyard delivered a big stack of ½” concrete backerboard and many bags of thinset.
It was now the third week in April. Time to destroy the floor. The ceramic tile was smashed with a sledgehammer, one tile at a time. Sounds like fun but isn’t, that tile is tough. Under the tile I found a bed of thinset in wire mesh that had to be smashed and removed. Many wheelbarrow trips to the dumpster in the driveway. Under that I found another layer of asbestos backed vinyl flooring in a lovely red brick pattern, with ¼” plywood underlayment, installed with what seemed like millions of nails. Time to wear a respirator and make many more dumpster trips. Under _that_ I found yet another asbestos backed vinyl floor (in very dark brown) with another layer of ¼” plywood underlayment, with another one million nails. Cannot take off the respirator yet. Finally, after a long second day the base plywood for the floor was located. Much fun time with a nail puller ensued getting all the nail gun nails out of this plywood, and in many cases I found just pounding them in flush was easier.
So up to now, we had a fully functioning (if messy) kitchen for the family. But the next step was going to change all that. On April 26th, I hired the neighbor’s teenage boy and got down to the serious demolition. The cabinets came out quite easily in only a few hours. The water was turned off, the sink removed and the supply lines capped shut. We then attacked the beams, soffits and pantry cabinet, which were made from studs and drywall. Amazingly, we had all the space wasting parts removed by the late afternoon, and started putting a few pieces of drywall up the same day! Since this was the first time both the neighbor boy and I had ever hung drywall, it was the blind leading the blind. But these few pieces were only done as a feel good effort, since much work electrical remained before patching up the soffit areas.
There were a few appliances deliberately left in the kitchen at this time, the electric range and the fridge. These, along with a long suffering Ikea table, would be the tools my wife would use to keep cooking meals. I had installed a small bar sink in our “test project” bar, and this was the only kitchen sink available now. Unfortunately, the bar sink only offered cold water and no garbage disposal, so washing pans was mostly an outdoor activity with the hose, which our teenage daughter loathed.
The phase we entered now was “prepare, prepare, prepare”. The space needed quite a lot of electrical work, since the soffits had been used to carry power wires all over instead of using the walls. In addition, the wall oven location required a new 30 amp 220v circuit, and a “beverage bar” area would also require additional 20 amp 110v circuits for two fridges and espresso making machinery. There was also additional lighting preparation required. So several days of electrical rearranging occurred, culminating with the removal of some flooring and the running of new lines to the electrical closet in the basement. Since the current electrical panel was full, a new subpanel box was installed and the additional circuits connected to this, which added research, shopping and time with main breaker off to the project. I took the opportunity to run cable TV and phone/network wiring to the bar as well, you never know when that might come in handy. I am an engineer and not afraid of the electrical system. This was a good thing, since more would end up coming my way!
Once the electrical was complete, I installed the vent hood ductwork. Like so many kitchens, our previous “vent” was the recirculation type. Since the ceiling was ripped open, this was the perfect time to add a real vent. This required drilling a 6” hole in the side of the house, installing a vent cap outside and hanging ductwork inside. The ductwork was not fun to deal with, especially cutting it properly. But after laying out the cabinet locations on the wall, the duct was hung and installed. An amusing side note here, the original range from 1978 must have had a downdraft vent, as we found a duct under the range inside the floor leading to the outside. The outlet for this duct was now covered with concrete, so no worries about air leaking in there!
Our original plan had the dining room door retained as is, but the thought of a pocket door here kept coming up. So, after a little research a Johnson Hardware pocket door kit and new door were purchased locally. The trick with this install was that the dining room wall was finished and had a chair rail installed – so I did not want to remove that. So I very carefully removed the drywall and studs from the kitchen side and left the drywall intact (but almost completely unsupported) on the dining room side. I then framed out the pocket door and installed the door kit, which consisted mostly of an aluminum rail like you might find in a closet on which the door was hung. Final finishing on this door would have to wait until the end of the project.
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Recent Blog Entries by cbracerx
- Final Review Part 3 (Sep 15th, 08)
- Finished Kitchen 3D Photosynth Experiment (Aug 27th, 08)
- Final Review Part 2 (Aug 25th, 08)
- Final Review Part 1 (Aug 25th, 08)
- Pretty Much Done With It, but one more post to come.... (Aug 25th, 08)
