Whatever Happened to the Kitchen?

I realize that I posted the story about the original condition of the kitchen ages ago, and you have all probably forgotten about it now. Here's a quick refresher.

With the removal of the asbestos covered duct, the kitchen was officially tabula rasa, which is so much easier than having to work within constraints. So I started sketching out some ideas, guided by the following principles:

1. Form follows function.
2. The way I function is that I love to entertain, and especially love to cook, but I am also perpetually running behind, and thus spend most of my parties in the kitchen, cooking.
3. Most of my cooking is actually prep work, which is best done with lots of counter space next to a sink.
4. Dining rooms, unless you are someone who throws state dinners frequently, are a total waste of space, especially when you only have 1100 ft2 total. I grew up with a snack bar and a dining room, and we spent 95% of our eating time at the snack bar.
   
5. Kitchens should have bookshelves for cookbooks.
6. Things shouldn't break when dropped on the floor, nor should my back hurt from standing on it.
   

So the ensuing form was:

1. The main usable space would be a new 8 foot peninsula (islands do not attach to a wall, my architect mother informed me when I referred to it as such) where the old wall dividing the kitchen and dining room was, which would house cabinets and drawers and would have a snack bar running the entire length. This way, people could hang out near the kitchen but not actually in it, which is how I prefer things when I'm in high-scramble mode.
   
2. The sink would move over to the peninsula and the stove would stay against the wall. This would give me about 6 feet of counter space for food prep next to the sink and 2 feet of counter space on either side of the stove. Again, since most cooking for me is prep, I could chat while I chopped.
3. People in Alexandria are generally afraid of modern designs (and I like warm kitchens anyway), so I went with classic cabinets in maple, but used modern zinc hardware, glass inserts on two wall cabinets, and splurged on nice pendant light fixtures.
   
4. The clean, white appliances were a financial choice, not an aesthetic one.
5. Faux-tile floating pergo floor wasn't my preference, but it was cheap, easy to install, and not too hard.
6. An awesome curved bookcase at the end of the peninsula holds (too many) cookbooks and (too much) stemware.

I worked with Montgomery Kitchen & Bath on the cabinets and the bookcases, and my experience with them was extremely positive but for a crack that occurred in the bottom corner of one of the glass panels during installation which they've never replaced, although I know they have the glass itself somewhere in the store but it's 7 years later and I feel too embarrassed to call now. But their design folks were really patient, and did an amazing job of designing semi-custom cabinets designed to hide the upstairs bathroom plumbing. The cabinets (5 base, 4 wall) are from Cabico, a Canadian company, and they have solid maple doors and drawers and plywood (not particle board) boxes. There is an advantage to plywood over solid wood in that plywood doesn't warp with time (and humidity). With my contractor's discount (30%, which he passed on to me), they came to $3,000, which is a huge bargain for the quality and for the custom shapes they had to cut out, and included a cabinet of large solid wood dovetail drawers, a cabinet with solid wood slide out shelves, and the custom-designed curving bookcase with solid maple back and maple plywood shelves. Take that, Ikea!

Six weeks after the order (during which time I discovered the joys and sorrows of drywall, and that drywalling a ceiling is especially sucky work), my contractor pounded on the door at the compromise hour of 6:45 am (he wanted 6 am) on Saturday and we put up the wall cabinets, which is quite an ordeal if you've never done it before. So that they can hold the hundred pounds of dishware you're going to put in them, wall cabinets are screwed into your wall studs with 3" screws, which gets tiring around screw 10, but you've got about 60 more to go. They are also screwed to each other and to the ceiling. Cabinets are heavy, too - especially when you're trying to get a bank of 3 interconnected cabinets up onto the wall at the same time.

Once the cabinets went in, I noticed for the first time that I had mentally mismeasured how much space would remain in the dining room once the new countertop was installed. I had thought I would have 8 feet, but now I would only have around 6, which made ever having a normal dining room table essentially impossible. As I mentioned earlier, I didn't personally care, but it made me worry about resale value, which is when I had the great idea of designing the snack bar counter to flip down so that for those few occasions where getting everyone around both sides of the table was required, the snack bar could drop out of the way instead of bonking folks in the head (an inspiration that actually came from that maritime-obsessed boat-dwelling ex boyfriend, whose entire living space involved flip-down/ fold-out/ Transormers-style furniture). Like all my great ideas, there was considerable difficulty and delay in the execution thereof. The countertop guy said he couldn't find hinges strong enough to support the weight of the snack bar that would also drop down. But my contractor, lover of all things German, recommended Hafele to me. I had already admired their beautiful zinc drawer pulls at Smoot Lumber, but at $15-20/each they were more than the $0 I had to spend. I found their website, opened their online catalog, and found perfect heavy-duty hinges designed for just this kind of application. So I called them to find out more and they ended up just letting me open my own business account with them and buying all of my hardware and the hinges at the prices Smoot was paying, which was about half the retail price.

Lesson #2 - Just tell people you're an interior designer or contractor and you'll get the discount. Go ahead and set up a contractor's account. It's not like they're checking ID because there's no ID to check.

The lights were procured from Dominion Electric - another place your contractor/interior desecrator shops, with quality well beyond Lowe's/HD for not a major difference in price (plus it's a locally-owned chain so the money I spend there stays in my community). Plus, if you're buying in bulk and you tell them you're a contractor/designer, you get another 20% or so off. I am normally a TERRIBLE liar, so I usually don't bother, but to be fair, I am my own contractor and designer, and now I'm giving them free publicity, so I feel less guilty about the fibbing. The lights are from Tech Lighting, maker of all things beautiful and expensive. They were $150 each, which was shocking at the time, but now doesn't seem so bad considering what the new project's track lighting is going to run us.

So the lights went in, the counter finally went on, the appliances went in, and the plumber came to perform a major piece of work: plumbing the kitchen sink and dishwasher. He didn't necessarily realize the transformative change that happened that day (although he did have a big smile when he saw my glee), but after 8 months without a kitchen sink, this changed my life in this house from something akin to a nice form of camping into something more like residency. Now all that was left was the tile and the painting.

I Get By With a Lot of Help From My Friends

In what was to become a tradition in all projects, my friends pitched in on various aspects to get the kitchen in shape by the next scheduled party, which was inevitably my annual Christmas party, a tradition I kept up for 12 years through several different homes and roommates, before tiring of the endeavor 2 years ago. The kitchen sink was installed in mid-November and the Christmas party was a 3 weeks later, which at the time seemed like eons, but as time wore on, seemed INSANE. What was I thinking in inviting people over?! The place was still a disaster area!

First, there was the tile. About 80 ft2 of it, actually, because of the knee wall for the snack bar. I discovered with the upstairs bathroom that I was not a fan of the wet tile saw, and also loved the bathroom at Evening Star Cafe (see also the bar wall at Rustico), which was a mosaic of broken tiles. This had instant appeal as what I thought would be time saving and I thought it would look really cool. You can be the judge (along with the next owner) of the coolness factor. I myself am sick of it and wish I'd gone straight up little modern grid tiles in the kitchen, much like when my mom warned me against the graphic-patterned dishes I bought out of college (tres 80s) and she said I would tire of them and should just get white, which caused me to roll my eyes. Two years later, however, I couldn't stand the sight of the grey-grid-with-colored-triangles Miami Vice-like crap anymore, and have had the subsequent set of white cafeware from Crate and Barrel for 10 years now. But i digress.

The problem with the tile is that the mosaic method is ultimately really time consuming. It's like creating your own jigsaw puzzle. I opted for 4 colors, which made it worse. I think I calculated that each square foot of tile was taking about an hour of time just to stick the tile to the wall, between breaking the tiles, finding the right pieces to fit together, and making sure no two same colors touched. Enter the army of friends. First was my good friend Lisa (and her dog Sienna), who were actually living with me at the time and for whom the guest bedroom is named, since she did the painting and spackling of it (future episode). Lisa and friends Ingrid and Leslie all did stints coming to help with the jigsaw puzzle tiling and Leslie and her husband Jason came and grouted the night away one night. I didn't finish the tile on the knee wall in time for the party, but put out a box of tile pieces and a tub of mastic and invited folks to have a go at tiling (no one took me up on it - probably a good thing given the potential for drunken tiling).

The painting was also trial and error - I had wanted to rag roll the walls to achieve an overall "modern mediterranean" feel, but discovered that rag rolling is ridiculous. I spent about an hour trying to get the 6x8 foot test wall behind the fridge into something decent and was going to give it up when I discovered Wall Magic. I painted the base color on the whole kitchen/dining room walls in about an hour, and then I used the dual roller with different (complementary) colored paint and glaze to "magically" achieve the look of authentic rag rolling in a fraction of the time (another hour). I've shared this tool with others and everyone agrees that Wall Magic is actually magic.

Okay, so, here it is, the before and afters (the tiling is now done).