Cardboard for visioning

The other day I asked Colin something about how the kitchen was going to look and he said that he could not really imagine it. I was astounded as I have had a vision of this kitchen etched in my brain, day and night, since we began planning. So thanks to a post on http://blog.imaginaryfoundation.com/ I decided to make a life size kitchen out of cardboard so that Colin could envision the kitchen just like me. Turns out our design was much better than either of us thought. Colin loved the cardboard bar that I made so much that he almost forgot that it was not real and was about to put his dinner down on it when I yelled out to stop him.

Being green: not only did we reuse the cardboard from the packaging of the dewalt tools, we then recycled it.

% Complete: 100% if you live in the land of pretend.

Budget spent: free cardboard box with the purchase of $500 worth of tools, left over paper from covering the floor- perhaps $2.00 worth. I would say that is one cheap remodel. Too bad it is too flimsy to keep.

Credit where credit is due

So I apologize to you, my dear readers, and I apologize to Colin. The way I wrote squares and symmetry or angles and asymmetry made it seem as if the corner stove was my idea. It was not. It was Colin's idea. I just loved it so much I would not let him consider the first option any longer.

Thanks for coming up with the best ideas honey!

Luna has gotten some bad habits from me and thinks it was her idea to take the cabinets out.

Up to code...well, a whole lot closer

So far we have done several things that have brought us more in line with being up to code. The first is the fact that we have actual 4 x4s as headers and not 2 x 4s. Yay! The house, or at least the doors and windows will not fall down. The second item is that we now have a 36" door into the kitchen. Seeing how huge it is makes me feel really bad for the guy who had to get the old kenmore stove out of the tiny door.

Luna has been exploring her new doggie door. I am bad and have not yet gotten the batteries for it so it is locked. When she does not think you are looking she will walk up to it and gingerly place a paw on the flat. Won't she be surprised when she can push it open. Picture are of the old stove, the old door, and the NEW big door (if standard can be called big.)

On a side note, a friend mentioned how funny it is that all my before pictures make it seem as if my house is a complete disaster area. Which it was! But my justification for not having the before glamour shots of everything neat and tidy is because of the way the kitchen used to be. No matter how much I cleaned it would never be neat because there was no place to put anything! So everything got stacked on the counters, tables, and floors.

Best Kitchen Remodel Idea Ever

I think the thing that people dread the most about a kitchen remodel is the fact that they will have to live without a sink for a long time. I have heard horror stories of people having bruised knees from doing the dishes in the bathtub. I was dreading this, although not the bathtub part since we have a utility sink, until I came across a fabulous idea in a magazine. You simply hang your counter and sink from the ceiling. WOW! Then you can rip the counters out below. This means I can install the new floors and still have my sink. Yay! If this is confusing that's OK. A picture is worth a thousand words so here are three thousand for you:

Before

After

a few of my favorite things

Here are a couple of pictures of items that I have bought (at fantastic prices) to outfit my kitchen. Like knobs and faucets.



Knobs were $1.87 each

Faucet was $117.00

No, I am not going overboard with the copper. It just seems that way from this post. But I promise I am not. Also, the colors of the items above are the same in real life- just not in their web lives.

symmetry and squares or asymmetry and angles?

If you know me, you already know the answer to this question. But if you don't, the answer is asymmetry and angles. Orginally, we were thinking of having the stove stay in its current location. But then my love of things coming out of corners got a hold of me. I searched the interweb of others who love corner items enough to sacrfice the unusable space behind them. Here is the example of both ( thanks google images):

Corner it is!

To move the window? or not to move the window? that is the question

What is the great part about our current kitchen? The giant picture window. Measuring 47" tall and 57" wide. What is the bad part about the window? It is two inches below where a counter top would be. Darn. I tried to think of work arounds, like making a copper front for the sill to make sure things (water, crumbs, other nasties) did not fall into that little space. We want concrete counter tops and that would make that abyss even deeper. At first, we thought of settling for Formica counters and just having a weird low window. But the more we thought about it the more we hated every part of that plan. To the left is the Before window.

Instead we started discussing the idea of switching the windows in the kitchen to put the big window on the south wall and little window on the west wall. My budget was not super happy with that plan. But since my honey is an enginerd ( engineering nerd, sorry honey) he made a model of what that would look like. I hated it the minute I saw it, but he still needed to think about it. I was worried our perfectly planned kitchen of my dreams was going to become a compromise I would always despise.

Thank goodness the compromise turned out to just putting a huge amount of effort into moving the big window up a whole six inches. Not just our effort but our firends, James and Wes' efforts too. Thanks guys!







And now for the After... See how much higher it is! Like a whole half of a foot! We also spliced up some electrical to see if we would like the pendant lights I got at Restore for 30 buckaroos. Please also notice that couter is now below the sill.