What I hated about my original kitchen

The original kitchen had a number of shortcomings.

The cabinetry was old, dark brown and the doors didn't hang right.

Insufficient counter space (okay, is there ever enough counter space?).

The built-in oven had a crack in the front glass panel and regularly inched itself forward out of its cabinet.

The cooktop had no counter on either side of it. On one side of the cooktop was the built-in oven cabinet, on the other side a drop with a doorway. The temptation to set things on the cooktop that will soon be needed was dangerously irresistable. I've done this. I've burned myself doing this.

The pantry was awkward to get into and not a very efficient use of space.

Between the dining room and the kitchen was a dead area. Too small for a table, but too big just to be a passage.

What can be done?

Designing a new Kitchen

In the winter of 1994 I bought a really lame, really cheap tool for doing kitchen layout and started planning how I'd change things.

My first plan was to modify the kitchen in place, removing the pantry and built-in oven and changing the galley-shaped kitchen into a U-shaped kitchen.

After making this comfortable decision, I took a sabbatical from kitchen design to finish my Master's project. I used the kitchen as something of a carrot ``Heather, when you finish your project you get to remodel the kitchen . . .'' Presented this way, even Dave eventually grew used to the idea that the kitchen should be remodelled.

When I returned to the kitchen a few summers later I found myself more ambitious. In addition to the above kitchen problems, there were . . . well, workflow problems downstairs. Between the kitchen and the dining room was something of a dead area, originally intended as a breakfast nook, but with the advent of a dishwasher and large fridges sometime before we bought the house, no longer of sufficient space to serve this purpose.

Non-kitchen workflow is a big problem. Incoming mail ends up piled up on whatever flat surface is closest to the front door. Mail and other incoming and outgoing things end up on the dining table, the kitchen counters or the stairs leading to the second floor. Bills get paid downstairs but there's no area downstairs to store them, file them or store things needed, such as checkbooks and stamps.

So, the summer brainstorming sessions included ideas of moving the location of the kitchen and creating a small downstairs office.

Cabinet selection

We ended up selecting orderable cabinets from our local Home Base store (long since out of business). I'd already done my layout and, from discussions with a neighbor and deep soulsearching, knew that I wanted a lot of deep base drawers.

I knew also that I wanted the cabinetry to run all along the side wall of the house, bridging together the kitchen and dining room, to use for storage of serving items and as a serving area.

Storage space needed for:

• pots and pans
• baking dishes
• trash and recylclables
• spice racks
• spice overstock (toe kick drawer?)
• plates, bowls
• china
• mugs
• flatware
• appliances

Countertop selection

It was always going to be Corian or other solid surfacing materials because I loved, loved, loved the sink.

I opted for a dark blue Corian (still the only real show in town for solid surfacing at the time).

Oven selection

Built in microwave/hood.

TheOven^? (freestanding/slide-in)

A brief diatribe on kitchen layout tools. My biggest complaint is that both tools I've experimented with (the cheap no-name package and 3D Kitchen by Books That Work) don't have a good way of forcing cabinets to sit next to each other. 3D Kitchen would be near perfect if it did decent dimensioning and if it supported some basic CAD functionaility such as orthogonal lines. One really minor but annoying problem is some measurement specifictions for objects are in inches, some are in feet and the user does not get to decide.

-- HeatherSherman - 13 Mar 2005
to top