Kitchen Makeovers: Before and After
Kitchen makeovers, updates, renovations, remodels …
Small Kitchen Remodeling: 7 Tips For Successful Projects
Planning a small kitchen remodeling project? Check out our tips to set yourself up for success.
- Tailor your remodeling projects to how you actually use the room. If you don’t cook much, but mostly eat out and heat up bought food, then maybe the cooking area can shrink in favor of the kids homework area, because that’s more important and useful to your household. If you grow a lot of food and spend days canning, then space for that may be a priority. The pretty-picture kitchens are designed for priorities which may be completely different from yours.
- Design yourself at least one decent sized counter area. 30″ is big enough for one person to do most prep, baking and cooking tasks, though more space would be better. If you break up all your counter space into little bits and pieces less than 30″, you’ll feel cramped with every job you do.
- Don’t bite off more than you can chew. What are you planning – a complete gut job with total replacement of everything from the studs in? Individual projects which add up to a makeover? Make sure you’re budgetng time and money in a way you can sustain.
- Consider smaller-than-standard appliances. Most of today’s trends are towards larger rather than smaller – giant pro-style gas ranges, wide french door fridges, huge farm sinks. If your kitchen is small, these oversized styles may be counterproductive. Apartment-sized appliances may do everything you need and give you more working space (18″ dishwashers, 24″ ranges, undercounter fridges). Or, you may want one star appliance to be larger-than-life, and the others to be slimmed-down to make space.
- Don’t try to squeeze too much into the kitchen. While the glossy magazines are full of great ideas for special-purpose areas like beverage and snack centers, baking centers, butlers pantries, etc, they mostly work in large kitchens. In a small kitchen, focus on the essentials – cooking, prep, cleanup and storage – and keep the feeling as spacious as possible.
- Try laying your flooring diagonally. Whether tiles or planks, in wahetever materials, diagonal laying is a classic method to get longer lines and the perceptiopn of more space.
- Consider lighting. Good lighting can make a small space seem bigger, while inadequate lighting can make a large space seem unfriendly or smaller than it really is. Task lighting is especially important, so include under-cabinet lights for your wall cabinets in your plans.
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Kitchen Island Designs: 6 Must-Know Tips
If you’re planning an island in your new or remodeled kitchen, there are some potential pitfalls and some important things you need to know before you start.
- Don’t create a barrier island. One of the biggest pitfalls in kitchen island designs is planning an island which sits bang on the major work pathway from range to fridge, fridge to sink, or sink to range. If you have to keep walking round an island – especially a big one – to get where you need to go, you’ll hate it.
- Research plumbing, electrical and range-venting requirements carefully before including a range or sink in the island. These issues can make or break the island’s position, and add substantially to costs if it’s awkward to get water to a sink, or drainage and vent stacks, or hood vents. Even if you can drop a vent hood directly over an island range, will it destroy your desired sight lines?
- Don’t feel tied to using the same cabinet finishes or countertop on the island as you do in the rest of the kitchen. You can use different colors, different woods, different materials on the island, although styles should be at least compatible (however you define that). Using special-purpose counter materials like butcherblock or marble is also a great opportunity not to be wasted.
- Your island doesn’t have to be fixed down (unless it contains plumbing, gas or electrical). You can use a big harvest table as an island, where you can sit down to work; a butcher block; even a kitchen island cart which can be rolled away against the wall when you want floor space more than island workspace.
- An island can be very useful for protecting the main workspace from traffic flow. If you can divert traffic around one side of the island and have the range and sink on the other side, it reduces cook-pedestrian collision potential greatly.
- Islands don’t have to be all one level, or at standard counter height. While you may want to have part of the island at standard counter height, other possibilities include: lower or highewr than standard counters: standard table height, for eating; breakfast bar height, for eating, leaning, and to make a space for guests to chat but stay out of the way; kiddie work height; adjustable height; wheelchair accessible workspace height.
- If your kitchen is big enough for a really big island (especially a LONG one), consider breaking it up into two islands with a passageway between. This means you don’t have to walk a long way to get round the island, but can cut through the middle, and it also offers the potential for different heights, counter materials and uses for the two different islands, as well as offering separate workstations for multiple cooks.
- You can easily DIY a simple island (no sink, range etc.) into your existing kitchen if there’s enough space, using some RTA cabinets (base or wall) and a ready-made counter.
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Kitchen Pantry Makeover: From Black Hole to Pantry Storage
Back when I bought this house in 2005, the first thing I did was rip out the bathroom completely, so I needed somewhere close by to store tools. Just outside the kitchen was a closet built out over the top of the basement stairs, which was shallow at the bottom and deep at the top, lined with waferboard, and shelved with unfinished pieces of cedar siding. Perfect for tools. So it became the tool pantry.
Pantry full of tools
Once the bathroom was (almost) finished and I was joined by a new partner, it became obvious that the tool pantry needed to become a food pantry. So we bought an IKEA cabinet which would fit near the current center of remodeling operations (it never ends when you have a house built in the 1930′s), moved all the tools into that and organized them much better, and emptied everything out of the pantry, including all the shelves and shelf supports.
Empty pantry left side
While the picture is pretty boring, you can see the odd angles of the walls, the strange varnished waferboard interior (partial – the inside of the door wall was just studs) and perhaps the dinged-up state of the door. You can’t see the horrid baby blue peeling paint on the door frame. Lucky you!
Because we wanted a vertical back wall to hang shelves on, I cut the back panel part way up, pulled it out, added vertical studs, and refitted the panel. I ended up with a strange angled join because of the non-rectangular nature of the space, but never mind. We won’t see it when everything is painted and the shelves are in… will we?
Pantry back wall now vertical
As you can see I caulked around all the joints since everything was very badly fitting and I wanted to keep out bugs migrating from the attic above or the basement below. Well, I can hope, yes?
Inside of pantry door wall
As well as rebuilding the back wall, I finished off the inside of the door wall as well. You may be wondering why the wall is that horrid pink color. And is that ceramic tile above the door? No, it’s sponge-painted faux tile on masonite paneling that came out of the bathroom, which was that color when I bought the house. It’s an improvement on raw studs, but wait: there’s more!
Pantry interior painted white
It looks a lot better with everything painted white inside, but those funny angles still make you feel a bit seasick, eh? I kept assuring my partner that we wouldn’t see it once the shelves were in, but I’m not sure I was believed!
The next stage after painting (3 coats all over everything) was to clean up the door (you can see I’ve started filling holes in the picture above) and scrape the loose paint off the frame. That was not a fun job as while the various layers weren’t sticking well enough to each other in many places to be painted over, they still held well enough that it took a carbide scraper to get them off!
Pantry shelving test
Here’s the inside with the first set of metal standards installed, and the unfinished plywood shelves installed to test for size before we painted them. Door frame scraping in progress.
And now, the completed pantry!
Pantry door with left and back pantry shelving
Back and right side pantry shelving
The shallow shelves on the right are 3-4″ deep and just fit against the door frame. They are so we can store as much of our canning there as possible just one jar deep, and be able to see what we have and eat it rather than leaving it in the basement and forgetting about it!
Finally, here’s the completed pantry full of food.
Pantry left and rear with contents
Center-right pantry shelving
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