Daily Home Renovation Tips

As mentioned in yesterday’s article, we were now at the stage of selecting a design for our new kitchen with Jim, our chosen designer; chosen that is as long as he could come up with a design which would be:

• accessible for all family members
• within the intended decor of the home after the renovations
• within a price range that we could afford

Notice that we did not mention above ‘…installed in the time frame per our home renovation plan.’ We’ll save that little gem for later.

Over the course of almost 3 hours, Jim showed us three designs. One was similar to the current design except rather than having the dishwasher and its counter top protruding into the traffic area, a U-shape would be used whereby there would be sufficient traffic area for our physically challenged family member.

The down side of this was that it would create a very narrow working area around the sink.

The second design was to have a totally open concept where the only counter tops would be against the walls. We felt this was too open. And, the downside was a significant reduction in both counter top area and in cabinet space.

The third option was to include an island. Lot’s more counter top and storage space with usable cabinets on the on 3 of the four sides of the island (the forth side being the new location of the dishwasher), still plenty of traffic area.

The picture below is the view from the entrance to the kitchen from the main hallway.

It took only 1 hour to select the design. The next hour was spent on adjusting the initial design, including the following:

1. Shortening the length of the island to ensure adequate traffic space in all areas of the kitchen, including the eating area adjacent to the kitchen

2. Selecting different type of drawers in specific locations of the cabinets (e.g. pot vs cutlery vs over-sized vs pullout [spice rack] drawers)

3. Selecting different types of shelving units (e.g. standard vs 2 foot deep pantry vs pull out selves)

The last hour dealt with reducing our ‘fantasy’ kitchen to one that we could afford. We cut back on what was pure fantasy (e.g. glass cabinet doors with built-in lighting), we could add on later (e.g. built-in desk at the end of the cabinets on the refrigerator side), and what we could live without (e.g. solid wood cabinets, premium drawers).

Next week, we will look at the sequence of tasks to install the new kitchen.

To continue with our 12 part series of articles on our kitchen remodeling experiences, simply select this link to Part 4.