On deck: The Kitchen

In January 2001, we purchased our home in EGR. It was the first "used" home Deirdre and I had ever purchased. Both of our previous homes were new construction and we were the original occupants. This home had great potential as well as an amazing back yard, and little by little, Deirdre and I put our own touches on the home. Now that we have decided to make this place our death house, we have started to truly customize the house. In the course of the past few months, we have had both of our bathrooms remodeled, replaced every window (save the one one in the kitchen), installed a new front door, and completely rebuilt and replaced the sliding glass doors in our back room. Our next assignment: The Kitchen. The extant kitchen serves its intended purpose, but it is tired and needs to be replaced. It was apparent when we bought the house that the previous owners began a remodeling project on the kitchen, but when they decided to sell the house, the project sort of stopped. The strange thing is that they installed GE Profile appliances, which do not come cheap, but they skimped on the lighting and the cabinets. The current kitchen is shaped like the letter L, and it is a typical design from the 1950s, when this home was built. The kitchen is long and narrow, and it also suffers from a near fatal design flaw: the clearance between the counter tops and the cabinet above is a mere 14 inches. This does not allow for much of anything to fit in the counter top, so the work space is quite cluttered.

Now that the window and front door project is complete, we are in the final staged of working out the details of the plan to remodel our kitchen. Once again, the professionals from HWC Homeworks have stepped up and created a great plan to better use the existing space. The plan is represented in the images in this posting, but we still need to make some critical decisions about the size and type of appliances we will purchase for the kitchen, as the appliances will drive the overall design. We know that we need a new refrigerator, dishwasher, microwave oven and range. One thing that we want to add is a beverage center, which is essentially a small fridge that will be installed underneath the counter to the left of the range. You can see the beverage center at the left of the image left of this text. We have always had a hard time storing the foods and beverages we want to in the refrigerator we have, as it is a 21-22 cu. ft. model. We would like to replace it with a larger model, perhaps one with a 25 cu. ft. storage capacity, but the current opening for the refrigerator is too small, we believe, to fit a 25 cu. ft. model. Thus, our new fridge will be 21-22 cu. ft., but we think that the beverage center will alleviate the storage problem we have right now with the existing fridge.

With a little work on my part, I will get the dimensions of the appliances together and send them to our planner, Rachel, so we can settle on the detailed drawings, sign the contract and get the ball rolling on our kitchen project.