How It All Began

I spent a little time thinking about trying to do a lot of the kitchen remodel myself, and I'm really glad we didn't end up going in that direction. Some of our friends are really handy, and while I'd describe myself as decently handy I'm not up to a project of this magnitude. 

We looked around a little and chose to work with a local contractor who is very well-reviewed and whom we ended up really liking. When we started this process, we thought that the remodel would keep more or less the same floor plan. I wanted to straighten out the island (no more hockey stick), convert the entire back wall to pantry cabinets, and remove the uppers by the gas cooktop.

That would have been fine, in a not-really-fine sense of the word. The kitchen layout is weird, and what you can't really see in this chaotic before photo is just how weird it really is. Off screen to the left are doors out to the screened-in patio, which is the main way we let the dogs in and out throughout the day. A lot of the traffic in this room runs left-to-right (you can see Ronin walking into the frame on this path) and it runs smack into the island. I don't know if that's bad Feng Shui, but it's definitely bad something. 

The contractor suggested that we change the layout, which threw me for a loop until I drew it all out in the VERY ROUGH sketches below (I'm fancy like that). I used my Rocketbook and a tape measure to draw everything approximately to scale, but the scale DOES vary from image to image. I'll spare you most of it, but the layout will switch to the one sketched out below, with all of the appliances on that back wall and the island turned to face the living room:

The new garage wall / back wall

The new overall layout

Part of the reason I drew this was because I wanted a good picture in my head of how many cabinets I was subtracting vs. adding, where the microwave was going to end up, and how much pantry storage I'd end up having. Because I'd spent a fair amount of time dreaming of a full wall of pantry cabinets, I was a little reluctant to give those up, even if they'd only ever existed in my imagination.

I did some back-of-napkin calculations, and between adding height on that back wall and going double-deep on island cabinets, I'm getting a net add of 55 cubic feet of storage space (NERD ALERT). Given that a standard base cabinet is 2 feet deep, and about 2.5 feet wide and 2.5 feet high (minus the toe kick dimensions), that's between 4 and 5 extra base cabinets' worth of space. It will probably end up functionally being more, because the existing pantry cabinets have SHELVES and I can only really fully utilize the first 8-10" of those shelves, especially at the bottom. The new pantry cabinets will have pull-out drawers.

Of course, moving the island will result in us having to re-do the floors. The hardwood floors were re-stained and refinished at some point, but they're not in great shape, so we're going to sand, stand, and seal them again. The color will probably stay somewhere close to its current dark tone but it will hopefully end up with a more durable seal. While we're doing that, we're going to replace the terrible engineered flooring in the bedroom and closet to match the rest of the first floor.

Here is a better visualization of the new layout that the contractor cooked up, from two different angles:

From this angle, you can see the double doors onto the screened-in patio:

I like that this "flows" better with the frequent traffic in and out of those doors, and I also like how it takes the work triangle from being shuffled off to the side on the small wall to the focus of the entire kitchen on that big back wall. When I'm prepping at the island, I'll be facing the living room and the TV. This layout, at least in my head, definitely feels more like an intentional design rather than a slightly awkward room that someone dropped some kitchen appliances and an island into.

I didn't even realize how claustrophobic the current gas cooktop felt until I visualized it with no uppers, no microwave, no anything crowding it. I can't even tell you how may times I've tried to plate food (especially pasta) from the cooktop and rammed my serving utensil into the bottom of the microwave. 

I wasn't sold on the floating shelves, at first, but there is an entrance from the garage there and I like that the sight lines and the travel path is no longer obstructed there by the uppers. That countertop will definitely house the coffee station, and I can also see it being a convenient landing place for groceries when we're unloading the car.

So, that's the operating design in a nutshell. It's a bit more complicated than that, but I'll get into that in a later post.