From the Kitchen File: A hopeful future kitchen designer meets with actual kitchen designer

    As I stated in my last blog, the cabinets in the kitchen of our new house are original to our 1991 home, but that’s not the reason we wanted to remodel the kitchen. The problem is that it has a tight U-shaped layout with 48 square feet of standing space inside our U of cabinets and major appliances. Overall the room is larger thanks to a generous breakfast area and room for sitting at the counter on one side. But as homeschoolers, we are home A LOT and are eating and cooking CONSTANTLY. And we are in each other’s way. All. The. Time. The first floor of our home is 1,100 square feet — more of those feet need to be in the kitchen!

I entertained a few different layouts, but our original idea remained our favorite. The kitchen is currently in the center of the house, bordered by the breakfast nook to the south and a closed-off dining room to the north. We will expand the kitchen into the dining room, move the dining room into the formal living room at the front of the house (which currently serves as a very large sitting room/office), and enclose the breakfast nook into a 10- by 10-foot office with the laundry area remaining in the closet of that room.

It will take rooms that look like this: 

Current view from the garage entrance into our kitchen with   
dining room in the distance.                                                      

And transform them (hopefully!) into this: 

Same view as above, with the wall removed and the kitchen   
spanning both the old kitchen and the future kitchen area in   
what is currently the dining room.                                           

I’ve written mostly about how this is a kitchen project, but I’m also really excited about the new dining room, which will be a couple of feet longer than the old dining room was. People keep asking if we will be sad to lose the breakfast nook, as most people tend to use their informal, in-kitchen eating areas more than their dining rooms. But we actually love sitting at the big table in a dining room!

Our old house had the perfect setup for open layout but still separate rooms as we had opened up the wall between the kitchen and dining room with a 12-foot wide opening. In this house the two rooms already have a 6-foot-wide doorway between them, which will give plenty of connection between the two.

Further, instead of putting the dining table in the center of the room, we’re going to put it closer to the external wall, hopefully with a 3-seater dining bench along the wall, which will allow lots of room to travel from the front door, through the dining room to the kitchen, and still allow a buffet on the opposite wall, and a coffee/reading nook in the bay window in the front of the house. Sorry, we don’t have drawings for this, as the only changes that will need to take place in this room are lighting and flooring.

For now, here is a picture of the current sitting room/office that will one day be the dining room, as we had it set up on Thanksgiving to accommodate the 20 of us: 

This is the view from the front of the house to 
the back, so this will be the future dining room
looking into the business end of the kitchen.    

Once Josh and I knew what we wanted to do with the floorplan, the next step was to talk with a designer/cabinet orderer about the specifics. Our friend who helped us with our basement at the old house introduced us to Emily, a kitchen designer in Timonium. We sent her the measurements and photos of my graph paper drawings of what we were thinking, then met with her in December to talk it over.

I was pretty nervous to meet Emily and hear what she thought of our plan. After all, designing my kitchen is a big deal to me, and now that I’ve been “retired” from the newspaper business for almost 8 years, and as my kids are getting better and better at covering their own basic needs, I’ve strongly considered pursuing a career in kitchen design. Last year I almost took a 6-hour course from the National Kitchen and Bath Association on kitchen design in the hope that it would help me 1) prepare for this remodel and 2) count toward getting me a job as a kitchen designer.* What would this professional designer think of my design???

My nervousness was completely unwarranted, our appointment went great! She loved my plan, and admitted that her kitchen is almost entirely drawers and that she wishes she had gone fully with drawers! Originally we had told her we wanted an 8-foot island with the sink, dishwasher, trashcans and drawers for the dish storage in it, but in my weeks of waiting to meet, I had decided I would really like some shallow, open shelves on the end that faced the stove and fridge where I could use baskets to store onions and potatoes and other pantry-like items that I want to breathe but not be seen, and that I kind of like those islands that have that “footed” look of solid anchors on the edges, and she totally agreed. We added the shelves, expanded the width of the drawers on the other side, and came up with a 10-foot island that will still be able to have a continuous piece of granite countertop (so long as we choose a slab that is at least 120 inches long)! The other change I made on the spot was to convert the utility/broom storage cabinet to the right of the fridge into a pull-out pantry cabinet, and move the microwave from under the counter to INSIDE THE PANTRY where it will be hidden.

Did I just blow your mind with that one?

It’s still pretty rare, but I knew some people put their microwaves in an appliance garage, I just wasn’t sure how safe that was. Do microwaves need airspace during operation? Emily confirmed that you can put a microwave in a cabinet behind doors, and that yes, some people are now doing this. Since we do not cook with our microwave, but are only heating up a dish of leftovers at a time, we decided this was a great option, particularly as I would love to have my countertops as clear as possible. (I have not yet figured out what to do with our toaster oven, which is stained and ugly but probably unsafe to put inside a cabinet because occasionally food smokes, but I’m hoping inspiration will strike sooner or later on that one.)

The last detail is I have no upper cabinets above or to the sides of the oven range…so what will go there? Josh and I did not use a vent hood in the old house, and we have decided we’re not going to install one here either. They just don’t do much considering the cost and visual space they take up, and we will have the sliding door just feet away if we need to get fresh air after a smoky broiler situation. So that leaves about 8 ½ feet of space that has nothing above counter level. 

Notice the lack of uppers. That big open space is a little
intimidating, but an opportunity to give the room some 
real personality!                                                              

Josh thinks floating shelves lead to clutter, but I see them as an opportunity to curate beloved objects and give the kitchen some personality. And not just Pottery Barn or “modern farmhouse” personality, but a real snapshot of who really lives here and what they like.

I don’t know what that wall is going to look like yet, but I did get (read: put) an object d’ art in my Christmas stocking this year that I foresee going on a floating shelf within reach: 

It is a toothpick dispenser. Yes, I bought my-  
self a toothpick dispenser as a stocking stuffer.
Welcome to adulthood.                                      

This little $12 functional knickknack may be my creativity jumpstart for this wallspace! And no, I'm not a deer lover, but I suppose I do love classy kitsch and it reminds me of my home design words: comfortable retreat. 

And by the way, I mentioned to Emily that I might like to be a kitchen designer in the future. “Oh cool, I can put your name in if you’re interested.” Whaaaaaaat??? Could it really be that easy??? Let’s hope that Future Carrie finds that it is!!!

Next time: I’ll start talking about choosing materials for the kitchen basics (cabinets, flooring, counters) in a world with endless choices!

 

*Side story: I ended up not taking the online kitchen design class because I was talking to Nanette, my kitchen department friend at Home Depot, and I had asked her how she got her job. She said she was working in flooring when she heard a position had opened up for a kitchen designer and so she applied for it and got it, with no experience, education or previous training. Once she got the job, the company gave her some training, mostly in the computer program the store uses, and now she’s been doing it for almost 10 years. So I decided to hold off on any course until I am closer to actually being able to pick up regular hours for a job, and besides, it seems like computer programs can change drastically within a handful of years. I’ve tried using the free kitchen design programs available online, and they’re pretty maddening. I asked an interior design forum I follow what program they would recommend a homeowner try, and they all recommended just sticking with graph paper.

 

From the Kitchen File: What I'm Looking For

   As I mentioned in my last post, Josh and I knew we wanted to remodel the kitchen when we bought the new house, but I had agreed to wait two years so we could feel the space out and see what we really wanted. The house still had the original oak kitchen cabinets but one of the past two homeowners had recently upgraded the plastic countertops with a new surface coating. The cabinets have that late 80s/early 90s orangey-oak hue and I sometimes get splinters from the particle board shelves, but my biggest peeve is the lack of interior shelves in the lower cabinets and the deep blind cabinets that make a search for a Rubbermaid lid into a spelunking expedition.

Real footage from one of our
blind cabinets.

I was so grateful that the previous owners had not further updated the kitchen! If one of them had replaced the cabinets in the same footprint, with a wood choice or counter I didn’t like, I would have left them there and probably just sighed every now and then over the beautiful kitchen I had left behind. But as they are, we can feel totally guiltless in ripping it all out and starting fresh. (The five-year-old refrigerator and oven will be going back in, but sayonara to the rest of it!)

“What color cabinets are you going to get?!?” a friend asked when I told her about the renovation.

When picturing the pinnacle of self-actualization of this kitchen, there were no colors of cabinets or highly-desired surface materials yet in mind. There was pure functionality: an island that keeps viewers away from workers, better access to the great room and the deck, and NO UPPERS for this 5-foot-tall mama to be lifting heavy plates over her head or reaching tippy-toe for ingredients! And drawers, drawers, drawers — as few cabinets with doors as possible.

Not the most conventional, I know. Even Josh had a hard time swallowing the No Uppers Declaration. Would we have enough storage?

Honestly, it’s a little hard to say for sure, but the best way I could test it was to pull out the kitchen floorplan from the old house (we still had the cabinet order with all the dimensions from the last remodel) so I could see that I previously utilized 36 by 24 inches for baking supplies, 36 by 24 inches for dry goods, 30 by 12 inches for plates storage, etc.

Why not just add uppers anyway and place things I don’t use much (or perhaps that Josh does) up high? I must admit, these new designs with a cooking niche for your range are very tempting to me — I love a cozy nook — but I went back to my core design label for this house: “comfortable retreat.” From the beginning, I decided I wanted the house to feel light, airy, and kind-of-fancy like a lush hotel that is trying to look like a home — but a place where you still feel like you can put your feet up anywhere. (That’s a tip for everyone, especially others like me who have eclectic tastes and can then have a hard time making decisions: define your style or goal, and then measure every choice or opportunity against whether it fits with your goal.) I’ve come back to “comfortable retreat” over and over again, and it has greatly helped me to limit my choices and get over options I kept waffling on.

Example of a cooking niche. 
Cozy, but confining.

Example of more of what I'm 
looking for.

So, while I love a cooking niche, I also hate it when I can’t reach something, and frankly I feel claustrophobic while trying to chop or do any prep work with upper cabinets so close to my eyes/top of my head. Granted, I have never actually hit my head on the upper cabinets, but I feel like I’m going to, and I don’t like that. So my plan is to have some form of open shelving on the range wall (6 to 8 inches deep compared to the 12 inches deep of upper cabinets), and then have built-in cabinets around and over the fridge, and 60 inches of pantry cabinets behind the island that will go to the ceiling. Yes, there will still be high places I cannot reach, but there will be no uppers at my eye level, and the dishes will be stored in drawers in the island, so my major goals are being achieved. And I suppose those less-frequently used items like serving platters and ice cream makers can go way up there.

Two years in, and THAT is what I determined I wanted most out of the new kitchen.

So how do we get there? By knocking down a wall, moving the primary workspaces of the kitchen into the dining room, moving the dining room into the front formal living room, closing up the breakfast area into an office, and exchanging a set of double windows that look onto the deck for a sliding door that allows you to access it.

It’s a lot. When I’m giving a friend a walkthrough of the space and explaining the future layout, their face usually says “ohhhhhh, thaaaaat’s a lottttttt,” because everyone knows that moving walls and plumbing and electric makes a project more expensive. Thankfully, the basement has a drop ceiling, and most of the utilities are just shifting — it’s not really starting from scratch, and another major plus is that we have great, skilled friends we can rely on to help us do the things we cannot do ourselves. We’ve gone through two remodels before, and I know that the results of a well-thought out project are definitely worth the work, expense, and headaches of going through them. Don’t all great undertakings come with work, expense, and headaches?!? 

This will be our first time living in the middle of a kitchen renovation, however, and I’m expecting the project to take 8 to 12 weeks, so the headaches will be bigger. But going into it with that expectation, allowing grace when it comes to feeding the four of us while working with a temporary kitchen situation in the basement, and keeping our eyes on the prize of fixing the only part of the house that gave us pause before buying it, should influence the way we experience the remodel. We can CHOOSE how we ACT and REACT. If we look at it as a nuisance, it will be a nuisance; but if we look at it as an adventure, it will be an adventure! I’ve told the kids it’s going to be like camping, but we still get to sleep in our cozy bedrooms and we just watch tv and eat meals in a bizarrely cramped basement. (Or at least that’s what I imagine it’s going to be like!)

So, that is the 10,000-foot high view of where we’re going with our remodel. Next time: more specifics!

Itchin' for a Kitchen (Remodel)

      “On this day, 15 years ago,” a Facebook memory reminded me on Jan. 22, I had shared my status of “is excited to see her countertops go in today!” (Sorry, I used to post in third person for some reason.)

I screenshotted the memory and texted it to Josh.

“Would that make remodeling a kitchen a 15-year itch for you?” he replied.

Ha! As if I would ever remodel the gorgeous kitchen we created out of a gigantic dining room/bedroom in the George Street house! (see photo at the end of this post)

No, dear friends, in my blogging silence over the past three years, Josh and I sold the beautiful 1921 foursquare we had completely renovated and maximized every square inch of, including the murder basement transformation of 2018, and we have moved to a lovely but kind of dated 1991 home on the other side of town. (The side without hypodermic needles in the gutters and adults who threaten to beat up 9-year-olds. Not their own 9-year-olds, mind you, but other people’s children. Though I suppose it doesn’t matter whose kids they are threatening to beat up — you get the point.)

Josh and I toured more than a dozen homes over the four years leading up to the sale, and made offers on two that we got outbid on. We even courted the owners of a GIGANTIC HISTORIC HOME that I was gaga over because it was actually two semi-attached houses that someone had combined into one mammoth home decades ago, and had two of everything: two front living rooms, two dining rooms, TWO KITCHENS (the owner was fabulous, she walked us through and when she explained that one was her everyday kitchen and the other was her PROJECT kitchen, I nearly swooned). The house was a full four floors and completely like something out of a British novel about orphaned children who go to live with a mysterious aunt and uncle in Westminster that they had never met before… but I digress. The home had no central air, a heating bill four times higher than we were used to, about 3,000 square feet more than we needed, and owners who thought they could get $200,000 more for the home than they eventually did, after we bought our house. It was the right decision to not pursue it, but boy would I have liked the opportunity to combine those two kitchens into a mega kitchen that would have measured 20 by 40 feet!

Back to our new west side home. At the time that we toured our new house, we determined the 30-year-old kitchen was definitely ready for a remodel and that the flow of the first floor could be greatly improved. Josh made me promise to give it a year or two before we rushed into a major renovation, but when we hit the 20-month-mark in August, I started asking for a timetable of when we could start. At first I pushed for Summer of 2024, but then I realized that meant the kids and I would be home a ton and in the way and without the use of most of our first floor, so I pushed it back to April. Josh sort of went into panic mode, but after talking with our friend who is going to help us, it sounds like he will be available during the end of April, so it is a compromise.

In those 20 months, I was able to put to words what it is that really bothers me about the existing U-shaped kitchen: we’re all in each other’s way. I may be the only cook, but we have four eaters and as 3-day-a-week homeschoolers who are home 5 days a week instead of 2 days a week like most families, one of the four of us is always eating, or preparing food, or trying to empty the dishwasher while someone else is trying to reach the tea in the cabinet blocked by the dishwasher door when its open, etc. We also have two blind corner cabinets, with only one, long but skinny shelf in them, so only about the first 18 inches of the 42-inch deep cabinet is actually useful. These two cabinets make up 84 inches of our storage space and they are only mildly functional!

Another weird aspect that might not bother some people is that we have this really big deck off of the dining room, but the way to access it is through the great room, which means you have to do a big C around the kitchen peninsula and through the great room to get to that door. Clearly not the end of the world, but say you’re having people over and grilling: there are a bunch of back and forth trips around the two rooms for all the plates and sauces and washing of hands and tools, and the guests who are lingering in the kitchen can’t see me or help open the door or even realize that’s where I went sometimes.

After several plans were thought up, a few drawn up on graph paper, and even a walk through of a neighbor’s remodeled kitchen of the same house model we have, Josh and I feel that the idea we had during our first walk through of the house when it was on the market is still the best floorplan change. I did the timetable walking backwards from April, and determined that meant we need to order cabinets in February, which meant we should have all of January to ruminate on a formalized plan and specifics before we order, which meant we needed to meet with our kitchen designer in December. And so we did, on Dec. 7! But this blog post is long enough, so I will pick up there in my next posting!!

We said goodbye to this kitchen:

And hello to this kitchen:

House I could have had a 20 by 40 foot kitchen in:

Do yourself a favor and view all 148 pictures 

If you want to see the George Street house one last time: https://www.redfin.com/MD/Westminster/38-E-George-St-21157/home/14439090