Kitchen Concepts - We can dream can't we?

First off - I realized that though we had made most excellent progress on the bathroom, we never closed the loop on the master. Where the paint had peeled away, I re-primed and painted and it looks fantastic. Becuase I'm taking a few minutes to blog from a coffee shop in Bloomington while Tiff is at baby yoga - I don't have a way to get some quick pics...yeah, I didn't plan well.

I might as well fill you all in on some other design ideas that we have for the house. I have been working in 20/20 Design (pretty standard Kitchen and Bath design software) to come up with some options for the kitchen. After many attempts that I was having trouble understanding how we would get to work (slab construction means no wet basement...but how do you move utilities, etc? The answer is with more concrete dust than we would care to deal with and cost that we would never recoup), we landed on a solution that will probably have an island without utilities that run to it.

As a reminder - here is what we are dealing with in the kitchen space (these were featured in a much earlier blog posting).

Things to note:

Soffits/Bulkheads. Great to bring down standard 24" height cabinets from the 50's, but a horrible waste of space in toe 2000's


The old track lighting and horrible drapes are already gone (per a post of some time ago, they were replaced - the drapes were thrown away because in our opinions, nobody should be subjected to those drapes...and they had never been washed/cleaned by the previous owner which made them a biohazard).

The sink is next to the range and there is no space for a dishwasher - which means we have a portable dishwasher, which has more recently taken to only operating on the light wash cycle, is generally a pain in the a$$ to wheel around and would require a new control panel ($200) to fix...such is life. Until we get the reno done, we are dealing with it. Tiff wants the sink below the window and I agree that would be ideal.

Unseen is the washer and dryer pair that is behind the half-wall. It was added there because, obviously, there is water, the ability to run a 220 line (in a scary fashion - typical of our previous homeowner) and those things just weren't so widespread in the mid-fifties when the house was made. (picture of a standard "laundry pair" from the fifties below - laundry pairs back then didn't consist of a washer and dryer, but a washer and a person. Also good to point out that new technology or nasty chores are much better when you make the implement smiley and/or rollerskate in advertisements. This art is now lost in the marketing realm.)


We needed more of a value line of cabinets to do the house in because of the potential resale value. MasterBrand, where I work, makes a good swath of products for the home at a lot of different price levels. You have seen the Aristokraft line in our previous posts about the bathroom, but for the kitchen Aristokraft didn't have all of the smaller cabinets that we needed to make use of the small spaces we would end up having between some of the appliances and the need for a sink base and lazy-susan (corner cabinet with a rotating shelf).


If we can get there, we want to do it in the Martha Stewart Living line.
From about the same point standing in the kitchen, you can see in this 20/20 perspective how opening it up will make a big difference.
You can also see (in the second rendering) the perspective from the living room.

Do we lose some storage in opening it up? No, we are actually reapportining it to make it more efficient. The island will have quite a bit or storage and we might even be able to put away our massive stand mixer. The cabinets below the window on the far right are actually vanity height cabinets. The window was lower and this enables us to make the space below them usable while varying the height of work surfaces and giving a bit of visual interest.

In staying true to the space, the Perry Street door style fits well with our mid-century modern home. It has thinner rail and stile (e.g. tops and sides of the door that you see), is availble in White and has glass options. I borrowed a picture of the door style "for real" below, as 20/20 renderings above don't really do it justice (I would also like to attribute the image to http://www.marthastewart.com/photogallery/martha-stewart-living-kitchen-designs)


So where do we go next? While we figure out some of the logistics of this big undertaking, we are working to get a flooring choice sorted out for what will be the laundry room and get up some pictures of the nursery as it takes shape!