The (dog) House

Last weekend we undertook the biggest remodel of our kitchen since we moved in and I’m here to tell you all about it.

Cabinet Doors

The biggest bang-for-buck in kitchen remodeling has got to be “re-facing” cabinets. For not much, you can re-paint your cabinets or even just cabinet doors, change out the hardware, and voila! you have a new kitchen. We had already painted the cabinets in our original re-model, but after living with it for a few years, I knew we could do better. We decided to put glass into not all, but the largest of the cabinet doors.

Before:

After:

Putting glass into cabinet doors is much easier with framed doors, in which case you simply replace the center wood frame with glass, but we have slab doors so it’s a little more tricky. I had to cut out the center of each door with a jigsaw and then devise some way to hold in the glass that would be both functional, decorative, and appropriate for the style and period of kitchen. I used pine cap moulding which I painted the same color as the doors when it was in place, thus integrating it with the doors and making it look like it had always been there. I think they turned out OK!

Drawers

Next to cabinet doors, drawers are a main component to any kitchen. My main revelation here? It’s hard to see something with fresh eyes when you’re in the middle of it and it seems so normal as to take on the shade of the world. Case in point; it’s only now that everyone is obsessed with monochromatic kitchens; all-green; all-wood; whatever. Oh, sometimes there are variations on the same color, shades and tints, which can make things more interesting. But after a lot of research, I was inspired that in the 1950’s they actually went for COLORS, multiple, honest-to-god colors!

Before:

After:

In fact, not only could 50’s cabinet doors and drawers be a different color from the cabinet frame, but the doors and drawers could be different colors from each other, as shown in my inspiration pics below. I love the bold enthusiasm that embodies and since we’re going for a mid-century kitchen to match our mid-century house (leaning slightly toward domestic grandma rather than commercial diner), that seemed the perfect direction to go.

Baseboard

The baseboard in a kitchen is easy to overlook. It’s hidden under the cabinets after all. We had originally painted ours white along with the rest of the cabinet infrastructure, but upon researching older kitchens I found that ALL of them had black baseboards. When I thought about it, black makes perfect sense. It hides scuffs, of course. And black would fade away underneath the cabinets, creating a negative space above which the cabinets float. To maximize this effect I used flat black that will reflect little light and after testing my theory; it works!

Faucet

This was an opportunity disguised as a problem. Our original faucet was a newfangled one-handle faucet with built-in extendable sprayer. But about a year after we installed it, the water pressure went way way down to a trickle. We tried to clean the aerator, but Pegasus designed that faucet so brilliantly that you cannot access the aerator, so we lived with it. For years. But while doing this kitchen remodel it dawned on us to replace it; not only was it diminishing the joy of dishwashing, it was not even period!

While shopping for a new faucet, I ran across one of those fantastic retro Dishmasters, and I was sorely tempted by it! But, I was so burned by our faucet problems that I wanted a technically simple faucet; basically just a pipe, with little to go wrong. Plus, the Dishmaster is clearly superior in its retro looks, but we have a dishwasher, so we rinse dishes more than wash them anyway and didn’t need the extra complexity of the brush, soap-container, etc.

Under-Cabinet Lighting

I recently changed the light bulbs in the kitchen ceiling light to a slightly lower wattage because the old halogen bulbs were putting out something like 900 watts equivalent of light; I was going blind and grandma’s 50’s kitchen looked like a cell at Guantanamo Bay. I hated the trip to the kitchen for a midnight snack. But the trade off after I lowered the watts was that I heard complaints from “house management” about not having enough task lighting. Solution: under-cabinet lighting!

Before:

After:

TIP: Fluorescent bulbs are a LOT less hot than halogen, meaning they’re safer, consume less energy, and you can keep them on longer, even as mood lighting. The downside used to be that fluorescent light was so blue it made everything an awful gray and that’s indeed the kind of bulb that comes with these lights. But times have changed. I replaced the included bulbs with bulbs that give off a much warmer light (3000 kelvin for fellow nerds) and it looks fantastic; pretty much like having a 60 watt incandescent bulb there. Warm-light fluorescent bulbs are easy to find now, especially online, and I got mine at El Cerrito Lighting. Keep the old bulbs as backup. Nice!

Inspiration Pics

We did everything ourselves, which served the purpose of making this remodel a real source of pride and back ache, but it also made it affordable and ultimately feasible. Mind you, I’m moderately handy with wood and tools, but I have no woodshop and I knew nothing about all this going in (kelvin bulb light? cap moulding? slab door? aerator? Jibberish!); I just did a lot of research online. Let me know what you all think, and if yo have any kitchen remodel stories or tips of your own to share. It seems like we’re done here…..but we’re never really done.

UPDATE JUNE 24

Here are a couple more shots of the “finished” kitchen to give the full context.

….and this kitchen re-do was not even the BIGGEST remodel/project we accomplished in the past couple of months! Tune in later for the grand unveiling……