Kitchen remodels

[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.