A kitchen retrospective

Over the past week, with the addition of the new range and microhood, we've been undergoing a mini kitchen remodel of sorts.  Nothing fancy, but this is the first time that Ryan and I have made decision collectively about the kitchen (just about every other remodel in the house has been a group--okay, mostly Ryan--effort, but the kitchen was begun before he came along and carried out by Mom & Dad the summer that I was in England).  The extra space freed up by the microwave gave us a chance to make a few decisions.

This post started out just being about the final touches we put on our mini-remodel... but then I realized that you can't fully appreciate how far this kitchen has come unless you can see where it began.  So this is a retrospective piece, showcasing the evolution of my kitchen.

Enjoy--but be warned:  If you are ascetically sensitive, you may find some of the early pictures offensive.

This is what the kitchen looked like when I moved in:
Also, something else you should know:  These cabinets were probably the worse use of space in the history of home construction.  See that drawer on the right side of the oven in the picture to the left?  What in god's name is supposed to fit in there?  There was not a single drawer wide enough to fit even a "narrow" utensil rack.  Corner space in the cupboards was completely under-utilized--and in some places just blocked off as dead space so it was unusable.



And another thing:  These cupboards smelled funny.  Not bad, but just like old, musty Seventies pressboard cabinets.  No matter how much I washed them, they always smelled like "that friend's" house growing up.  You know that friend.  Oh, was that you?  Sorry.

 So yeah.  Dark fake wood laminate cabinets, rust linoleum with a wrought-iron pattern, and yellow countertops with yellow backsplashes.  It cannot get more awesome.  Oh wait, yes it can--but you'll have to wait just a minute for more awesomeness.

My first act as homeowner of Casa de Book was to paint these badboys.  I chose an offwhite that actually made the yellow countertops look somewhat "cheery."  At least that's what they'd call it in a real estate blurb.

But then there were the floor.  This flooring was unbearable.  God awful.  Wretched.  Any rug that was put down just drew attention to the fact that you were trying to cover up one of the most ugly creations on the planet.  But it was also glued directly to the concrete slab, meaning that replacing it wasn't exactly a weekend project.  So I found a creative solution.

Welcome to Crazy Kyanne's Putting Green!  I think that the green, yellow and white actually went together quite nicely for a springy, fresh look.  It was cheap, and could be changed out and/or hosed off easily after spills.  Not everyone agreed with my tastes, but whatever.

This picture demonstrates FOUR additional bonus features of the original kitchen:

1. There's a little bar area above the sink (lower foreground of picture).  This is too shallow to actually be useful, but exists nonetheless.
2. A nifty dark brown florescent bar light running the length of the faux-bar.  Provides nice light, with the added feature of boxing the kitchen in.
3. A balast-style florescent light fixture (barely visible behind the bar light.
4. Popcorn ceiling texturing!  In a kitchen!  
5. Which leads to our super-duper #5 bonus--years of grease collected in said ceiling.  Look close now!  If you expand the picture and look just behind light--all that brown stuff?  That's your bonus!

My next interim step was to get rid of that micro-hood.  I'm not exactly sure why I did this, actually.  I pretty much just didn't like it.  Here's a home renovation tip: Do not install or remove microhoods alone!

So now the microhood is gone and I have a regular hood in and I'm thinking of painting and all is going along time until the Ikea It Only Happens Twice A Year Sale.  I discover these gorgeous pine cabinets on closeout and decide hey, why not?

Thus beginnith the demolition.

Here, Dad is scraping off the nasty acoustic/popcorn texture.  Even nastier, there was so much grease on the ceiling that it was hard to saturate it with water.  Nas-TAY.

Not exactly sure what Dad is doing here (the title of the .jpg is "Dad tearing stuff out") but that crappy bar is gone and behind him you can see my temporary kitchen.  Microwave, cereal, coffee maker,  and a few dishes, all stacked on top of my dining room table.  For a work surface I had an old cabinet door laid on top of a couple of cabinets.  It was about this time I met Ryan.  He didn't even know I owned a dining room table for months!

Under all of the dishes, you can also see the insane and useless sink I had.  It is a relatively small sink, but it was divided perfectly in two, meaning that neither side was good for anything.

 Yey!  The upper cabinets are in!  (Later, we would find out that they were in-in the wrong order).  Dad is hard at work, and you can see that I have no sink/dishwasher/water whatsoever.  We removed that whole sink wall so and pushed the kitchen out as far as space and plumbing would let us.  It turned out to be about 8 inches, or about 6+ sq. feet of floorspace in the kitchen.  It sounds like nothing, I know, but in a tiny little kitchen like this it makes a huge difference!

A word about that bare cement floor you see.  Peeling up linoleum that has been glued to the cement slab for almost 30 years sucks.  It sucks hard core.  It sucks--well, you get the idea.  I spent hours, HOURS scraping off that damn linoleum.  Dad and I experimented with all sorts of scraping tools, but basically came down to elbow grease and a sharp blade.  My knuckles were scuffed up for weeks from hitting against the cement.  NOT FUN.

It was about this point in the story that I abandoned ship for England.  While I was gone Mom and Dad  finished installing the lower cabinets, countertops, and generally pulled the whole project together.

See my new sink?  One big basin that can fit a frying pan (my test) and a new faucet that pulls out AND sprays.  Cool.

And aren't those cabinets beautiful?  I LOVE the Ikea cabinet system.  Assembling the cabinets is very unlike most of their flat-pack furniture.  As Dad put it "those Swedes are pretty damn smart!"  Instead of hanging each individual cabinet, you rails which the cabinets then slide onto. The other thing is that all of the cabinet frames are the same (also, not wood, hence the reason I can afford them).  That means that there's a huge variety of organizational options that you can mix and match.  For example, in the corner on the right by the oven, I have a carasel, where once there were several cubic feet of wasted space.  On the left side I have two pull-out racks:

Sweet!

And this is pretty much how things stayed until we got our new range last week.  After much haggling with Sears, our microhood finally arrived too.  Here's the whole shebang!

(This picture really shows all the extra space we added!)

With the introduction of the microhood, Darth can finally move onto greener pastures.  Meet Darth:

Darth is this ginormous microwave that Mom and Dad bought when I was in high school college? a long time ago.  Mom said she wanted a microwave "big enough to cook a turkey in."  And Darth definitely met that description.  He's HUGE.  But when I moved out he was free, soooo.  Darth made me many nacho dinners in my first apartment, but since we rarely use the microwave we thought a microhood to free up valuable counterspace in our tiny kitchen would be a good move.

And here's today's newest edition!

A pot rack!  Now I feel like a real chef!  It also frees up lots of room for me under the counter so I can buy more stuff!!!

So for comparison:

The original:

Painted (and cluttery, I'm not sure why I ever took this picture).

Remodeled!

Tada!  New appliances and new pot rack!