Planning our DIY kitchen remodel— tentative layout and design.

The kitchen is the only room in the house that has not dictated its own layout.

Even the bathrooms, which seemed to have no end to the decision-making, really only had three items that needed to be triangulated.

And even though the tile search drove me insane, I was not trying to redefine the CONCEPT of tile… I was willing to accept the theory behind a water-resistant material applied to the floor in a semi-permanent manner.

But with the kitchen, I wanted to redefine EVERYTHING… it became a grueling slog through ideas that went nowhere, Craigslist purchases that were misguided, and my fantasy of Newport-Gilded-Age-Butler’s-Pantry-of-Fanciness-That-Only-Cost-Five-Dollars.

Getting the piano as our island finally helped eliminate some options and we are planning traditional cabinets around the perimeter of the room.

Here are some details you need to understand to help make sense of the kitchen design… (if you REALLY want to understand the space, you can go back and look at these three posts: kitchen, addition, overall layout.)

— you enter our kitchen from the left of the refrigerator, and the sink wall is the first thing you see.

— did we consider swapping the sink and the range? Yes. But the current layout is the most visually pleasing to me: I do not want to walk into the kitchen and see the stove… I’d like to keep the width of the room feeling as open as possible.

— even though we are going to have traditional kitchen cabinets around the perimeter, I would prefer to keep anything distinctly kitchen-y out of the immediate line of sight.

— plus, our repurposed antique piano kitchen island is the immediate focal point when you enter the room, and I would like to complement that.

— the entrance to the kitchen is cut on an angle… (there used to be a swinging butler’s door.)

—in the mockups, the unused wall appears to be suitable for cabinets, but it is actually too tight to accommodate anything countertop-depth… (possible if we’d gone with a smaller island.)

We could do shallow, pantry-type-storage; either recessed (like our DIY medicine cabinet), or slightly bumped out, but with furniture-details to make it look built-in… even just 8″ deep would be a huge amount of storage when spread from floor to ceiling.

BUT I’m running out of wall space in this house. And at some point I will find something giant and fancy that I’d RATHER put there. LIKE THIS, so I am unwilling to commit to boring practicality.

Here’s the inspiration anyway… I don’t love the barn doors, but they illustrate a shallow space hidden by something repurposed. (I would do salvaged pocket doors instead.)

— my overall goal is to keep the kitchen as open as possible.
The room is long in relation to the width, especially if you consider the addition… I would really like no upper cabinets at all, but I’ve explored the extent to which that would be a LOT of open shelving. So we are going to do glass-front upper cabinets which should help make it feel less boxed-in.

—unconventional window layout.
On the sink wall, we have a window in the corner, and one to the right of where the sink will be. We’re not going to move either of them and we’re not going to add a window. We considered it. But ultimately, our house was built in 1890… not everything will be like new construction.

— the window in the corner is only 10” off the range wall, and goes nearly to the ceiling.

We considered cabinets with glass sides, and also having the cabinet end directly into the window, forgoing molding… but have decided that a short run of open shelving will be the best solution.

We can float the shelves, so that the window molding is uninterrupted, and we don’t end up with issues trying to connect the cabinet’s crown molding into the window’s 120 year old/totally different molding.

I’m still sorting out details; you can see I’m using a mix of designs and perspectives… the overall plan is working itself out now that I’ve accepted traditional cabinets, but I haven’t started on the specifics, which is the miserable part… for me, decisions = paralysis.

Where we are now/ what’s next:
– move the makeshift kitchen BACK to the kitchen area so that we can
– remove the half bath in the addition.
– gut the back wall.
– sheet rock the wall where we remove the bathroom.
– sheet rock the ceiling in the addition.
– install recessed lighting in addition.
– gut / sheet rock the sink wall in the kitchen.
– decide about kitchen floor.
– decide if we are taking up the flooring in the addition.
– paint back doors— inside white/outside color.
– paint everything else– no more orange!!!!
– make decisions about kitchen details/layout/cabinets.
– find piano drawer hardware.
– figure out some window configuration for the back wall.
– order windows.
– install windows.
– scrounge up matching molding for new windows.

Like this, but fancier:

index of all kitchen posts