Kitchen remodels

[Irulan]

I thought that after we finished up the addition that it might be years before DH agreed to get the kitchen done after his fall out with the contractor...
Surprise! We have to get a new dishwasher, and after looking at appliances all afternoon with me, DH is making lovely noises about getting going.

So, for those of you that have redone your kitchens, here's what I'm looking for input on
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

[Crankin]

When we remodeled our kitchen, we kept the basic structure, although we could have changed that to make it more open. Currently we have a kitchen/cooking area, an eating area that is separated by a counter with shelves, cabinets, and the stove on one side, and a formal dining room that is more open to the kitchen. The previous owners used our eating area as a family room, but it is smaller than most family rooms... we have a huge family room on our lower level that is fine, although it makes our house different from homes built since the 90s. But, we saved A LOT of money by keeping the basic bones of the space.
I don't regret much; this was by far the best of the remodeling we did (and we did a lot). What I would change is that instead of getting a combo microwave on top, oven on the bottom, I would have got a double oven and found some other way to deal with the microwave. I don't need a double oven often, but I always wish I had one a few times a year. Also, when we bought our refrigerator, we did it on line and didn't realize that the mechanism for getting the filtered water sucks; I won't go into the description, but let's just say it's a good thing there's no kids here. Hence, we don't use it, and I'm glad we have good tap water.
We have granite counter tops and while I love the granite, I would not get black again, as it shows every speck of dirt and water that dries on it. I love my stainless appliances, and besides what I mentioned above, I would make sure you get a good dishwasher. We recently replaced the one we put in during the remodel (7 years ago). I'm happy with the maple cabinets and the tile floor. I am super glad we decided to put in cabinets on the back side of that divider; they weren't there before and we have a lot of stuff.
I am pissed at myself, however, for being so lazy that I didn't pick out anything different for the counters and cabinets in our master bath remodel. Even though our house is contemporary, I think having the same thing that's in the kitchen is too plain; thankfully, we did get different tile up there.

[Chile Pepper]

I love my kitchen! I have dark green granite, and like Crankin, I love the granite but would prefer a lighter color. Granite is easy to clean, and you can put hot pots right on the countertop. I also love my range. It's a Lacanche, which is in the same price range as Wolfe etc., but it has some advantages: it isn't as deep as a Wolfe, so it doesn't stick out beyond the standard counter or require a custom fit; it combines both gas and electric (I have a model with a gas range top + one gas oven for roasting and breads + one electric oven exclusively for desserts + one electric broiler for non-pastries); and the smaller ovens don't dry out food. I would absolutely buy this range again.

[luvmyguys]

I didn't do a kitchen remodel, but the kitchen is the one selling point of the house we bought. I'd thought a lot over the years on what I did and didn't want, and here are some of the things I figured out along the way:

* We preferred no island to a small island. It seems to take up space and doesn't give you a whole lot to work with. We actually have a peninsula, which I love. I get space to work on both sides, it's flat so I can put counter top height bar stools on one side, and it makes a great buffet line when we have family gatherings over here. Overall, I have a lot more storage and prep space.

Piggy-backing on to that:
*We preferred the bar stool side to be counter top height, rather than the higher height for full size bar stools. Instead of two tiers of fairly shallow space, you've got one tier of deep space.

We do have a granite/natural stone countertop (technically, it's not granite, but it is a similar natural stone). It does chip fairly easily (particularly around the sink). It doesn't look terrible or anything, but we have had to have it repaired (which, fortunately, is easy, just a pain). We deliberately chose a dark color, because in this house, we do spill things. So I'd say to do your research on the maintenance aspect of whatever counter material you use.

[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...

[pll]

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.

I hope you share pictures of the project! I day dream with being able to remodel my kitchen. I'd go for a modern take. Like your dust collectors, I'd put top cabinets that are flush with the ceiling -- my current ones leave a "shelf" at the top, so it's storage space wasted. One thing I've seen in some European kitchens is a glass backsplash. I think it is a special kind of glass. This is appealing to me because the smooth surface makes cleaning easier. Here's a picture of a kitchen in Lisbon (from here: http://www.rbdapp.com/):

[Blueberry]

We had stainless steel appliances in the home we purchased last. We remodeled the kitchen, but the appliances were too new to toss. I hated the stainless steel - every little thing showed (we cook and use the kitchen a lot, and I spent a lot of time polishing the &$%& refrigerator).

Wish we had had enough room to do a kitchen table and a bar area. People always wind up hanging out in the kitchen in my house.

[Irulan]

Re Stainless : I don't love it either, but it's the holding trend. Almond is out, colors are out, black is out.... stainless and white seem to the the options right now.

Biggest lesson learned: pay attention to every detail and check the contractor's work every night.

Boy, do we know this one! DH works at home and keeps an eagle eye on them.

I am very interested in the composites like the silestone etc. Granite takes more care than one thinks, and even the resident geologist doens't want it.

I'm hoping to keep the existing floor for now, but I'm not sure how that will work. If it has to go, I will look into cork.

It's got great "bones" in term of general layout, and existing work triangle. I have a huge pantry that I'm going to keep.

https://picasaweb.google.com/penny.s...eat=directlink

[withm]

A few people have commented on having had problems with their contractors. That is too often the case and gives the entire industry a bad name. So let me start by saying that I work for a general contractor who specializes in high end remodeling. We, and certainly most of our real competitors, will bend over backwards to be sure the homeowner gets what he/she expected. Homeowners who go with the cheapest estimate they get, but expect to have a project worthy of House Beautiful or Architectural Digest, are setting themselves up for disappointment. While not impossible it’s probably not likely either. Talk to several contractors about your project, and spend a lot of time evaluating what one will offer over and above the lowest estimate. Budget concerns may drive you to lower priced components, fixtures but you should understand what you are giving up when you buy the $99 toilet (or insert any appliance). You might have to flush several times, but you saved $200 . Think about your trade-offs. Talk to your friends, and their friends, about their remodeling experiences, and get recommendations for a contractor. A more reputable contractor should be able to give you references and take you to see some finished projects.

1. What I wish I had in my current kitchen - a functional exhaust fan. This house came with a non-vented fan that is useless. And better quality cabinets. 30 yr old particle board disintegrates.

2. What I hate the most about my kitchen: stove is right next to the wall. If I am stirring a pot on the right side burners, either the spoon, or my elbow hits the wall constantly, and spills the contents of the spoon. You need at least 10-12" of countertop on either side of your stove.

3. What seems like a good idea - ceramic tile on the floor? It's hard on your feet/legs if you are cooking a lot, and EVERYTHING you drop breaks. Everything. Or worse, cracks a tile. Sure, it's easy to clean, but the grout gets icky, and well, everything breaks. You can drop a glass on a wood or vinyl floor and it might not break. I have tile right now, and would never ever have it again. My summer house has a hardwood floor, which is great. Heated tile might be nice, but you still have the hardness factor, and the breakage. I don't think heat makes up for those (to me anyway) drawbacks, but it’s great in a bathroom!

4. Countertops - I have laminate, it's over 30 yrs old and really needs to be replaced. My next kitchen will have soapstone countertops. We have granite at work - it looks nice when it's been cleaned and not full of lunch dishes and stuff, but it's cold, hard, and if you knock over a glass, oh well. It's broken. We put in laminate at the summer house due to budget concerns. It's very forgiving. Corian and many other new surfaces costs just as much as granite. There are a lot of interesting countertop surfaces out now, and it's one place you can have fun. There are some websites where you can play with your kitchen, change the floor, cabinets, countertops, and appliances to see how they all look together.

5. Biggest waste of $? Hmm, I'll probably incur a lot of wrath by saying granite but I really don't like to break things. However if you bake and need a place to roll out dough for bread, pies, cookies, think about including a baking center with a granite top. I don’t like appliance garages, but if you have a big and heavy Kitchen Aid mixer or a heavy food processor for example, be sure you plan for where you are going to put it.

6. Best $ spent - a quiet dishwasher. I replaced a 30 yr old noisy D/W with a new Bosch. You can barely tell that it's on. We bought a Fridgidaire for the summer house that's even better – it has great racks for wine glasses and bowls of any size. My Bosch does not fit my wine glasses, nor my soup or cereal bowls well at all. Task and undercabinet lighting. I wish I had that now. I am always chopping things in my own shadow. We did it right at the summer house. And the slow/self closing drawers are wonderful. We also got some pretty slick swing-out corner cabinets that let you really use that buried space at inside corners, much better than the lazy susan style.

If you are changing the layout, I'd want to be sure to have some counter top on both sides of the sink and stove and even on the fridge if you can so you have room to put things down. Our summer kitchen is not very big, but we have a great peninsula where the cabinets open on both sides, so no climbing into the cabinet to get the big pots out from the back, or the bottom. Just walk around to the other side to fetch them. We can have 4 or 5 people actually cooking or prepping at the same time. Many people forget to plan for a place to put the trash, and a place to put the brooms and mops and stuff, so keep that in mind. The electric code will dictate the minimum number of outlets - you can always add more, and that's probably a good idea.

The trend is for open floor plans, with eating areas in the kitchen. Quite frankly I hate that! When I have people over for dinner, I don't really want them to see the pots and pans awaiting washing. I also want to try to contain cooking odors, and we want to sit in the dining room and not have anyone at the table thinking about the kitchen or dishes, pots and pans awaiting washing. Then there were the 2 women who wanted me to teach them how to make a béarnaise sauce. They were aghast when I put in an entire stick of butter and however many egg yolks were required. Their looks were priceless but they ate it all. While it’s nice to have company and help in the kitchen, there is a lot of merit in Julia Child’s wisdom when she said, “Remember, “nobody can see you in the kitchen.”

[Crankin]

I have no issue with the beautiful tile in my kitchen. Yea, we have occasionally dropped something and it broke (like a glass), but it probably would have done the same in my last kitchen, which had hard wood floors. I liked those, too. At first, we questioned the wisdom of hardwood in the kitchen, but it worked. I have hardwood in my kitchen eating area and dining room now, but tile in the cooking area/entry way. My feet don't hurt, either, and I do cook. We did look into cork, but at that time we just couldn't spend the $.
And +1 on getting the best dishwasher you can. The one we got for the remodel, well after 3 years the top rack disintegrated, fell, and broke about half of our glassware that was in there! The same thing started happening again, so we got a Bosch a few months ago and I like it a lot.
I love stainless. Yes, splatters show, but just a quick wipe with the stainless cleaner after each meal does it. Same with the granite cleaner.

[goldfinch]

I've had kitchens with tile floors, wood floors, marmoleum and old fashioned linoleum. My favorite was the wood. It was an old floor but refinished with some extra layers of finish. It was very durable and looked nice for all the years we lived in that house.

The tile was ok but I did not like the grout line maintenance.

The marmoleum is in our condo. It went down in planks over a cork base. I have some issues with it. One is that the dog has trouble walking on it. She slips. It doesn't feel slippery but for some reason the dog has trouble. It also shows dirt. I got a light, bright yellow and it is very pretty but boy you have to keep it clean. Finally and worst of all I dropped a knife in the kitchen and it made a little chip in the floor. The chip always looks dirty. Most might not notice it but it makes me question the durability. It has only been in a couple of years so I don't know what it is going to look like long term.

The old linoleum is in our summer home. At some point we are going to replace it, probably with wood.

A friend has cork floors in their kitchen. The cork had a light color dye on it rather than natural. The dye is wearing off and it doesn't look very nice anymore. If you get cork I would get it without a dye.

One thing we did in our old house was really work on the lighting in the kitchen. We added two skylights. What a tremendous difference it made in the natural lighting of the room. That was the best decision we made. We also put in a gas fireplace on a timer. In freezing winter mornings I could wake up to a nice, toasty warm kitchen. As an aside, we also put heated tile flooring in the bathroom, which was incredibly nice as well.

[7rider]

So, for those of you that have redone your kitchens, here's what I'm looking for input on
1. What do you wish you'd put in and didn't for whatever reason
- We should have run an air duct to the back part of the kitchen. The kitchen is the width of the house - but the back half used to be a porch, so there's no heat/a.c. We should have found a way to run a duct under the island to get something to the back half, as it's always cold in the winter, warm in the summer in the kitchen. (New windows will help, but we are waiting to put a deck on the back of the house for those to be replaced. We need to find a money-tree first.

2. What did you put in that seemed like a good idea at the time, but you don't love for whatever reason
- I can't think of anything. Maybe having the flooring put in on a diagonal, instead of straight. The flooring folks recommended it because the walls really aren't true, but we have some angles on the cabinets and counter tops, and the lines don't match. It's a minor thing, but I notice it.

3. Countertops - what do you have, do you love it/hate it/too much maintenance etc
- Granite. Love it. Costly, maybe bad for the environment, but super easy to deal with and looks fab.

4. biggest waste of $$
- appliances with cabinet covering (fridge and dishwasher). I suppose we could have just had a standard face to them, rather than "hidden". Not huge waste of money, but an unnecessary extravagance.

5. best $$ spent
- The whole job. The kitchen works better. I love the second sink we put in, and I love that they are recessed. You can just wipe stuff right into it. No fuss.