Kitchen Renovation: Mini Series Part 1

​Three years ago, when I was in my writing hiatus and before my little kids were born, I gutted and renovated our kitchen with my husband and then-four and five-year-olds.  Our kitchen was a disaster, with half of it over an unfinished, poorly sealed crawlspace.  So, this became an area that we had to fix no matter what.  

The old kitchen had a lot of problems: there was a mouse-hotel under the cabinets with exits outside through the crawlspace, the kitchen plumbing froze in the winter, and the corner cabinet doors only opened about 5 inches wide.  Like that corner cabinet, the storage was a mess.  The fake oak MDF , broken counters, and weird obviously-fake brick really didn't fit this house.  There was a lot that needed to happen, and half the battle was getting a plan together to figure out the best way to make it work for us. 

Take Time

While we've been happy with our kitchen for three years, we lived in the lipstick-reno of our old kitchen for three years before we started tearing out the old one (two and half years counting the ceiling).  Finding a way to live in what we had was a huge boon to getting the current plan right.  In a new-to-resident space, that wait time is really helpful in understanding what does work and what tweaks are needed to make it better.  

Our kitchen work triangle (proximity among the sink, stove, and refrigerator) didn't change much at all: the fridge was shoved in the corner and we moved it a bit closer to the sink, and the stove moved 16" away from the sink.  The sink remained in place under the window.  Everything really changed around the sink, since changing the plumbing would have been a large, unnecessary expense.  

If I had rushed through planning the kitchen and renovating before we moved in, I wouldn't have landed on a plan with so much usable space.  Early on, I played around with corner pantries, built in wall ovens, and a much more cramped refrigerator location.  And had I not taken my time, the salvage items I was able to source wouldn't have been available yet.  It would have been a good kitchen, but not necessarily the right kitchen for us.  

​Sources

A lot of what nailed down the design for the kitchen were elements that already existed in my house and items I sourced on a whim or hunted for over time.  One of the ways that I complete projects is by sourcing and storing a lot of the materials before I even start the project.  The sense of security from this method gives me a lot of jumping-off points for planning and really helps me to spread out the budget and save overall. 

I sourced a lot of things as salvage items.  The glass doors on the pantry-side were from the neighbor's trash, the enamel sink was through an online sale, and the light fixtures were a mix from my grandparent's house with fittings I ordered on Etsy.  It's surprisingly hard to find 4" brass pendant fittings!  But I was glad to have a pair made to my specifications.  

The Plans

I played with a lot of designs for this kitchen, and I did some of that in SketchUp.  It's software I still use pretty regularly, and it helped me to get the dimensions of everything just right for what we needed, and scrap things that wouldn't fit this house (like a corner pantry).  The software also helped me to set up visuals for my partner: since this was the first big project over here, he was still a little nervous to get going... especially after I decided to build the cabinets myself.  

Once I got the doors from the trash, I scrapped one section of the initial design, and switched back to pencil and paper to finalize how I was going to construct the cabinet boxes around the door dimensions.  The final design landed on a pantry section surrounding the fridge next to a butler's pantry-inspired counter space on one side of the room, and an L-shaped work station for the other half of the room with all other major appliances.  The old cabinet configuration was awful, but the redesign of the cabinets made it so much more functional even with eliminating some of the cabinets around the sink.