House p. 9 - the kitchen
So, here is the kitchen.
The kitchen is large (good!) and has lots of cabinets (also good!). The cabinets are dark (enh.) veneer (better than melamine) over particleboard (whatever, you do what you’ve gotta do) with raw fiber edges (ugh!!).
Both the vinyl floor and the floral wallpaper are from (late in) the “country colors” era - cream with dusty blue and dusty pink. Embarrassingly, this is strikingly similar to wallpaper my mother and I installed in the kitchen of our house in 1988, but when I mentioned that to her last weekend, her immediate response was (1) this was the height of fashion in 1988, (2) much better than the orange that was there (3) as good as she could get without offending the owners of the house. Additionally in her defense, Mom did not have medium-tone wood paneling in our kitchen, so the net effect was not as… striking. And I’d be willing to bet somebody has changed that paper by now, as Dirk and I are about to do to this house. We’re probably not tearing out the wood panel, but painting it.
What the cabinets lack in quality they may make up for in quantity, though - it's a nice long wall of storage - and I really like the lightness of the workspace created by hanging the upper cabinets extra high, leaving a tall, appliance-friendly, not-shadowed countertop work area (which does require a stool to reach above the first upper shelf, though). There’s a pantry (excellent!!) and an in-wall hutch. In another house, it could have been a built-in china cabinet (it could easily have been cut to face into the dining room) with milled wood trim and glass-panel doors. Here, it is a kitchen pots-and-pans hutch: blunt square white framing all around, inelegant and very useful, excellent for storing cooking pans, conveniently next to the stove. Wait, what’s the stove doing there? . The stove is kind of free-floating, no countertop next to it, no vent hood overhead.
These cabinets were installed by the current owner (okay) and were, so far as I can tell, built by him also - unfortunately he’s a creative guy, and rather expedient. The average cabinets come in widths of (18+N*3) inches, and appliances come in standard widths like 24” dishwashers, 30” or 36” stoves, etc. Funny how those match up, isn’t it? On the other hand, if you don’t have a dishwasher and the stove is across the room, you could just build long continuous cabinet facings the lengths of whatever board you happen to have bought. No problem! We were enthusiastically considering buying a dishwasher, but then somebody smart (thanks, Mr. Tiede!) pointed out to us that there wasn’t anyplace to put it, and/or that if we cut a hole for the dishwasher there would be awkward incomplete cabinets next to it.
We have two current plans, and we’ll have to see which one wins once we’re standing in the kitchen considering our options. Both involve scooting the stove over and putting a work-top next to it. Plan (A) - buy a portable dishwasher with a butcher-block top, keep it next to the stove, wheel it over to the sink as necessary. Plan (B) - Move the 18” drawer-stack cabinet from the corner by the fridge to go next to the stove, and convert that pocket between the fridge and the wall into a broom closet (excellent for storage of vacuum, brooms, mops, light bulbs, anything we don’t want to have to go to the basement after). Plan B was the plan in place when we thought the dishwasher could actually install under the counter, and if we do the portable dishwasher thing, I’ll miss the hypothetical utensil and potholder drawers next to the stove and the hypothetical broom closet. There are broom hooks on the basement stairs, and vacuum cleaner storage could be a fine use for the mudroom, but I do like the idea of an actual cabinet.
The most awkward thing about the kitchen is that in the long term, it totally cannot be the way it is. We would very much like to pull it apart and start over. None of the appliances is less than 15 years old. Cabinets and flooring are seriously unaesthetic. Layout is not the smartest. We’ve played around with various kitchen-builder software, and found it vastly educational. I would love to move the stove over to the outside wall so we can install a vent hood, but that puts the wall-hutch kind of isolated instead of as immediate handy storage. There’s currently space for a kitchen table - but fitting the stove into the countertop there turns the space in front of the window into a higher traffic area (oven door); so maybe an island with breakfast bar? But is that really an improvement? Too many options. It’s all hypothetical, though, because we’re not doing any of that any time soon. We’re vaguely planning that after our savings account recovers from the down-payment, and assuming there’ll be a furnace purchase about the time that happens, and we recover from that, maybe in 5 years we’ll be ready to turn the kitchen to the way we actually want it.
So how much do we improve the setup to get us through the next 5 years, and how much do we just live with it?
Is it worth changing the floor? Definitely not.
Is it worth cutting into the cabinets to install a real dishwasher? Probably not.
Is it reasonable to want to convert the stove from electric to gas? Not if we can help it, until we’re certain where we’ll want the gas line to go.
Is it worth installing pull-out slidey shelves in the bottom cabinets? Maybe, if we can reuse the hardware later; definitely for the wall hutch. That thing is deep, and some glides on the bottom shelves would be very handy.
Can we get a new faucet with a sink sprayer? Maybe.
Is now the time to paint the walls and paneling, even if we end up re-doing it later? Definitely.
Is it worth painting the cabinets to make them less dark? Probably. But no matter how much the formica splits or stains, the countertops have to wait.
I occasionally go kind of panicky about the amount of work I'd like to do to the kitchen, but then I remind myself that it's perfectly functional and there's nothing that absolutely has to get done before we move it. De-papering and re-painting is a fairly high priority, but the list can actually be pretty short if we need it to be.
The kitchen is large (good!) and has lots of cabinets (also good!). The cabinets are dark (enh.) veneer (better than melamine) over particleboard (whatever, you do what you’ve gotta do) with raw fiber edges (ugh!!).
Both the vinyl floor and the floral wallpaper are from (late in) the “country colors” era - cream with dusty blue and dusty pink. Embarrassingly, this is strikingly similar to wallpaper my mother and I installed in the kitchen of our house in 1988, but when I mentioned that to her last weekend, her immediate response was (1) this was the height of fashion in 1988, (2) much better than the orange that was there (3) as good as she could get without offending the owners of the house. Additionally in her defense, Mom did not have medium-tone wood paneling in our kitchen, so the net effect was not as… striking. And I’d be willing to bet somebody has changed that paper by now, as Dirk and I are about to do to this house. We’re probably not tearing out the wood panel, but painting it.
What the cabinets lack in quality they may make up for in quantity, though - it's a nice long wall of storage - and I really like the lightness of the workspace created by hanging the upper cabinets extra high, leaving a tall, appliance-friendly, not-shadowed countertop work area (which does require a stool to reach above the first upper shelf, though). There’s a pantry (excellent!!) and an in-wall hutch. In another house, it could have been a built-in china cabinet (it could easily have been cut to face into the dining room) with milled wood trim and glass-panel doors. Here, it is a kitchen pots-and-pans hutch: blunt square white framing all around, inelegant and very useful, excellent for storing cooking pans, conveniently next to the stove. Wait, what’s the stove doing there? . The stove is kind of free-floating, no countertop next to it, no vent hood overhead.
These cabinets were installed by the current owner (okay) and were, so far as I can tell, built by him also - unfortunately he’s a creative guy, and rather expedient. The average cabinets come in widths of (18+N*3) inches, and appliances come in standard widths like 24” dishwashers, 30” or 36” stoves, etc. Funny how those match up, isn’t it? On the other hand, if you don’t have a dishwasher and the stove is across the room, you could just build long continuous cabinet facings the lengths of whatever board you happen to have bought. No problem! We were enthusiastically considering buying a dishwasher, but then somebody smart (thanks, Mr. Tiede!) pointed out to us that there wasn’t anyplace to put it, and/or that if we cut a hole for the dishwasher there would be awkward incomplete cabinets next to it.
We have two current plans, and we’ll have to see which one wins once we’re standing in the kitchen considering our options. Both involve scooting the stove over and putting a work-top next to it. Plan (A) - buy a portable dishwasher with a butcher-block top, keep it next to the stove, wheel it over to the sink as necessary. Plan (B) - Move the 18” drawer-stack cabinet from the corner by the fridge to go next to the stove, and convert that pocket between the fridge and the wall into a broom closet (excellent for storage of vacuum, brooms, mops, light bulbs, anything we don’t want to have to go to the basement after). Plan B was the plan in place when we thought the dishwasher could actually install under the counter, and if we do the portable dishwasher thing, I’ll miss the hypothetical utensil and potholder drawers next to the stove and the hypothetical broom closet. There are broom hooks on the basement stairs, and vacuum cleaner storage could be a fine use for the mudroom, but I do like the idea of an actual cabinet.
The most awkward thing about the kitchen is that in the long term, it totally cannot be the way it is. We would very much like to pull it apart and start over. None of the appliances is less than 15 years old. Cabinets and flooring are seriously unaesthetic. Layout is not the smartest. We’ve played around with various kitchen-builder software, and found it vastly educational. I would love to move the stove over to the outside wall so we can install a vent hood, but that puts the wall-hutch kind of isolated instead of as immediate handy storage. There’s currently space for a kitchen table - but fitting the stove into the countertop there turns the space in front of the window into a higher traffic area (oven door); so maybe an island with breakfast bar? But is that really an improvement? Too many options. It’s all hypothetical, though, because we’re not doing any of that any time soon. We’re vaguely planning that after our savings account recovers from the down-payment, and assuming there’ll be a furnace purchase about the time that happens, and we recover from that, maybe in 5 years we’ll be ready to turn the kitchen to the way we actually want it.
So how much do we improve the setup to get us through the next 5 years, and how much do we just live with it?
Is it worth changing the floor? Definitely not.
Is it worth cutting into the cabinets to install a real dishwasher? Probably not.
Is it reasonable to want to convert the stove from electric to gas? Not if we can help it, until we’re certain where we’ll want the gas line to go.
Is it worth installing pull-out slidey shelves in the bottom cabinets? Maybe, if we can reuse the hardware later; definitely for the wall hutch. That thing is deep, and some glides on the bottom shelves would be very handy.
Can we get a new faucet with a sink sprayer? Maybe.
Is now the time to paint the walls and paneling, even if we end up re-doing it later? Definitely.
Is it worth painting the cabinets to make them less dark? Probably. But no matter how much the formica splits or stains, the countertops have to wait.
I occasionally go kind of panicky about the amount of work I'd like to do to the kitchen, but then I remind myself that it's perfectly functional and there's nothing that absolutely has to get done before we move it. De-papering and re-painting is a fairly high priority, but the list can actually be pretty short if we need it to be.