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!