Almost Done!

I was hoping to record everything in the proper order, but it seems ridiculous to go back and post about dry wall and wiring now that we have moved in and started cooking!

Have a look:

Views from the Dining Room (you can compare the the before pics posted on August 31st.):

From the south wall:



And from the north:

It is so much more open and usable than it was before.  We love it!

Still to do:  Bar stools and pendant lamps (where the blue tape is) and lots of caulking and painting.

Demolition

Tearing things apart can be fun.  Especially if you are a sixteen year old.  All of those years of Tae Kwan Do are paying off: it turns out that back kicks are perfect for knocking dry wall panels off of framed walls! 

 

Of course, what's fun for the kid might not be so fun for the parents.  What have we done?  Was the old kitchen really that bad?!

It is interesting to see what lies inside the walls of a 104 year old house.

We found layers of wallpaper glued right on top of the "shiplap."  There was no lathe and plaster in most of the room.  Instead there were solid boards nailed onto the framing.  This stuff is old growth fir,  we probably should have tried to salvage it, but most of what we cut out was in fairly short lengths and had been painted.

We Have Cabinets!

I'm skipping by all of the demolition and wiring and insulating and wall boarding and priming and painting.  Because......

WE HAVE CABINETS!!!

Here's a simulation (our counter sample sitting on the edge of the uninstalled sink base.)

This is more realistic:

But they are supposed to be installed by Friday and then the floor goes in next week! 

(If you look past the boxes you'll see what a great job Joe did on the paint.  Ceiling is just whatever Benjamin Moore calls ceiling white and the walls are "Grain 03" by Yolo Colorhouse.  I did help a little, but my lack of meticulousness relegated me to priming!)

What Will Be...

From the ground up!

The Floors will be cork planks by Ecocork in Cuervo.

The Cabinets are by a local semi-custon place.  The style is shaker, frameless.  The wood  is alder and the stain is called Autumn - a warm brown.

This door style:  In this stain:

Most of the lowers will be drawers.  We're looking forward to having plenty of storage in the floor to ceiling pantry cupboards on the south wall.

Most of the counters will be Zodiaq (It's made out of quartz and recycled glass and resin) in Coriander, but the two upper bars and the windowsills will be Richlite (think Chemistry lab tables) in Chocolate Glacier:

Coriander:  Chocolate: 

There won't be much wall space, but we will probably paint what there is in a warm yellow (like the background of this page!).

The appliances are staying,

The 30" Blue Star is one year old  --  The Miele came with the house     --         The GE Profile is five years old

                (love it!)                                (love it!)                                              (hate it!)

except we are buying a new Zephyr Milano hood:

In theory we will have two pendant lights over the dining room bar, but we probably won't buy and install them right away.   There will be ten(!) can lights in the kitchen with dimmers.

 

What was . . .

This is what we started with:

Views from the Dining Room. 

We will be opening this up quite a bit but the chimney stays.

From the south wall:

And from the north.

The wall with the pans hanging on it will be opened up quite a bit and the refrigerator will be pushed west so it lines up with the range.  The door to the deck will grow from about four feet to six feet wide.  There will be penninsulas where the rolling cart and table are now. 

Here's the plan...

We are doing a full, down to the studs remodel of our kitchen (we're rebuilding the porch too, but that seems trivial in comparison!).  The old kitchen had plenty of room, but the cabinets were falling apart and the storage was poorly arranged.  Our goal was to update the whole thing to make it work more rationally, to open the kitchen up more to the dining room and deck and to carve out a usable sitting/work space as a refuge from the busier living room.

So, here's the basic plan....