Cooking up a kitchen "refresh"...preface

Over the past couple of years, we had determined that a kitchen remodel/redo/refresh was in order. The house we live it is truly "vintage." Built by my great-grandparents in 1913, it has seen its fair share of history, children, holidays, sorrows and most recently, better days.

We moved in about 16 years ago, knowing we had some work to do. The house had been sitting empty for a few years and definitely needed a little TLC.

The foundation/basement walls showered the floor with debris as you walked by, over the years water had gotten into the basement a number of times and it still held that damp musty smell. The floor as much dirt as it was concrete and I remember as a child being afraid to even venture there. We jacked (read: hired someone to) the house up and put a new basement below, reconfiguring the mechanical room into one corner rather than spread out throughout the basement.

The attic was full of "treasures," insulation not being one of them. So we added insulation and several boxes of mouse poison, both were effective.

We replaced the windows throughout the house, only after a couple of years of going the "tape the plastic and shrink with a hair dryer" route, which was getting old, and was ruining the beautiful woodwork.

We had replaced carpeting, painted every color under the sun, literally, and moved the main bathroom/shower from directly off the kitchen to a more private upstairs location.

And yet the big elephant in the room, the kitchen. It was time to eat the elephant. How do you do that? One bite at a time. 

Click for larger imageThe before: While the home was built in 1913, the kitchen had been remodelled sometime in the 1950's. My father actually helped to build the cabinets. They were of sturdy construction, but had plain Birch plywood doors. The corners of the doors had plenty of "character" marks but were still holding together well, they just weren't particularly attractive.

The hardwood floor had long been carpeted, and when we moved in, we put down a very light colored Berber with plenty of flecks to hide whatever gets tracked in when you live on a farm and the kitchen is the first room you enter into. In the years following I often regretted that choice, given we had two small children consuming hundreds of gallons of Kool-aid.

Click for larger imageThe walls were currently a very bright "ketchup" and "mustard" colors as my daughter Megan had proclaimed. I had selected that theme when the trend was not to be "afraid of color," and I found a couple of chef prints that I liked and pulled the colors from there. I liken it to the 1980s hairstyles and shoulder pads. Just "too much."

A hutch had landed in the kitchen after we swapped some things around in the dining room, and basically just became a home for a lovely collection of clutter and misc. things we didn't quite know where to put them.

You will notice the refrigerator is recessed into the wall. Well, the layout of the kitchen is such that there are 5, yes 5, doorways from the kitchen to other various parts of the house. One of those was the door to the basement, which we moved when we put the new basement under, so this left a big void, and conveniently, the refrigerator fit back into that space perfectly. More conveniently it took the refrigerator out of my kitchen space freeing up more room for the table. The stairs to the upstairs of the home go from right to left behind that wall, leaving another small space, just enough space for a dishwasher, which I otherwise did not have room for. Not ideal, but it gave us some space.

But, it was time for a change...Join me over the coming days/weeks as I share the journey of the process and the end product, and all of the creative challenges along the way.