Kitchen remodels

[tulip]

1. What do you wish you'd put in and didn't for whatever reason
2. What did you put in that seemed like a good idea at the time, but you don't love for whatever reason
3. Countertops - what do you have, do you love it/hate it/too much maintenance etc
4. biggest waste of $$
5. best $$ spent

I love to cook. I enjoy function and simplicity over decoration and frills. An example is that you'll never find fancy crown mouldings or rope mouldings, or fluted columns in any kitchen of mine as I believe they are dust collectors.

Cheers
Irulan

1. I wish I had replaced the existing window (original 1939 double hung sash that doesn't open) with a custom casement that opens. I also wish I had installed a dedicated water filter faucet. I have one in the fridge, but I would prefer one at the sink (more accessible, easier to fill teapots & glasses).

2. Nothing. I use everything! It's a small kitchen, though, with little room for extra, single-use features. My contractor sucked. I'd never use him again, that's for sure! I do have a microwave that is also a convection oven. I rarely use the convection oven because I prefer my gas oven (GE Profile--it's great). But if I ever had to bake a lot of stuff, the two ovens would be very handy.

3. Concrete. They are great.

4. Waste of money?...nothing. I use all features. I have had to replace my Bosch dishwasher, however, and I got a KitchenAid. I wish I'd gotten a KA from the beginning.

5. Best $$ spent is custom floor-ceiling bamboo cabinets. Lovely, with no extra unusable, dust-and-junk collecting space on top of the cabinets. Also full glass door to back stoop for light. If that door were still solid, it would be very dreary. I also knocked out a wall to open the 12' x 8' original kitchen to the living/dining area. Now it's all open and I love that.

Actually, the best thing is the size and design. Everything is within reach and I've it a near-perfect work triangle. My counter-peninsula is wide and useful. It's has very clean lines and is minimalist, which is my style. Under counter lights are also a must for me. Oh, and self closing drawers.

Enjoy.

[ny biker]

My brother's advice to me: figure out how many electrical outlets you will need, then add 10 to that number. (His family of four recharges all their various electronic gadgets in the kitchen.)

I have a small kitchen in my 1BR condo. I was just so happy to get rid of the old, dark musty-smelling cabinets.

I love the soft-close cabinet doors and drawers on my new cabinets.

My floor is Marmoleum. Not as cold as tile but not sticky like vinyl flooring because it's made with natural ingredients.

My counters are Eco by Cosentino. Similar to Silestone, looks and feels like granite, but made with recycled materials. It's black with sparkling specks of recycled glass. The only drawback to black is that I think water spots show up on it more than on other colors. But that's not such a big deal.

Biggest lesson learned: pay attention to every detail and check the contractor's work every night. I found a problem with opening the under-sink cabinet door because it's next to a corner and was hitting the cabinet next to hit. After studying the diagrams from the person who handled the cabinet order for me (an excellently helpful woman in the local Lowe's kitchen department) I saw that they were supposed to put a 3-inch spacer between one of the cabinets and the wall, but the contractors had not done that. This was after the counter people had done their measurements, so I had to have several of the cabinets moved to add the spacer while worrying that they might change the overall footprint of the base cabinets and screw up the countertop order. Everything turned out okay, but if I had checked things more closely on the day they installed the base cabinets I could have resolved the problem right away when less was at stake.

Anyway it was a long and tiring process but at the end it was all worth it. Good luck.

[OakLeaf]

I haven't done it either, but we may be in the next few years, and here are some things we'll definitely be doing:

Electric outlets in the island, if you have one. One on each side.

LED lighting. It's expensive now - what you might do to save $ is to put in an incandescent setup for the time being, because the price of the screw-in LED bulbs is dropping very quickly.

Cork flooring. We have cork in our downstairs, not in the kitchen, but when we do the kitchen it will DEFINITELY have cork. It's resilient, comfortable to stand on, insulates both temperature-wise and sound-wise, easy to clean, beautiful, nearly indestructible ... and if you try really hard to damage it, the variegated appearance will completely hide the damage anyway. Best illustration I have to compare tile vs. cork: I dropped a plastic spatula on my tile kitchen floor a couple of weeks ago and it shattered. Shattered. Counterpoint: a couple of years ago I dropped a small TV on its corner on the cork floor. You have to look really hard to find the dent ... and the TV still works.

[ny biker]

Cork flooring. We have cork in our downstairs, not in the kitchen, but when we do the kitchen it will DEFINITELY have cork. It's resilient, comfortable to stand on, insulates both temperature-wise and sound-wise, easy to clean, beautiful, nearly indestructible ... and if you try really hard to damage it, the variegated appearance will completely hide the damage anyway. Best illustration I have to compare tile vs. cork: I dropped a plastic spatula on my tile kitchen floor a couple of weeks ago and it shattered. Shattered. Counterpoint: a couple of years ago I dropped a small TV on its corner on the cork floor. You have to look really hard to find the dent ... and the TV still works.

Hmmm. I'm hoping to rip up the hideous wall-to-wall carpet in my living room and bedroom and get new wood floors in a few months. Maybe I will take a look at cork. If only it could dampen the noise that comes from the condo upstairs...