Remodel

Where shall we begin our story? Do we begin with a sale at IKEA in the fall of 2011? Do we begin with hurricane Ike and the long deferred repairs that resulted? How about the horribly cheap remodel of the kitchen performed sometime in the 1980's or 1990's? Yes, let's start there...

Good Ideas / Bad Ideas
First, let's remember that this house was built in the 1920's. Back in those days, you had a kitchen and you had a living room and you had thick walls between them. Today, that's not what we want in our homes. Today, we look for large, open areas that flow together. Fortunately for Sharon and I, someone had already performed that transformation on this house during a previous remodel. Somewhere along the line, someone had torn out the wall between the kitchen and living room, and added a master bedroom to the back of the house. For a 1920's bungalo in The Heights, we started all this with a fairly large kitchen....large in square footage, but short on utility.

Just because you have a great deal of space allocated to a room, does not mean that space can be put to use. For an example, let's take a look at the wall with the sink.

There are upper cabinets, lower cabinets and then, presumably because there needs to be access to the panty, the cabinets stop and there is an odd, basically useless corner.  The pantry is nice and deep, but also contains the washer and dryer. Continuing along that wall, we have the refrigerator and an open corner connecting a living room and a hall to the bedroom. Continuing to rotate around the room, as you look into the living room, you find the only other cabinets and the one viable work area; a space we refer to as "the peninsula."

The peninsula, being central to the space, collects clutter and as a result ends up being a much smaller space than it at first appears. Those two problems (weird corner, few workspaces) did not become apparent until we had used and lived in the kitchen for some time. There's another, bigger problem that was far easier to spot : those are cheap, cheap cabinets.
Perhaps it was because they were already paying to knock out a wall and/or add an entire master suite to the house, but they decided they could save some money by going to the back of the big box hardware store and buying the cheapest cabinets they could find. Your know, the ones that expect to be installed in your garage. They are mostly particle board, have cheap pulls and pathetic supporting hardware. Some of the drawer slides were already beyond repair by the time we stared dating (I would have to find other ways to prove my worthiness).

What Next
Sharon knew that the kitchen would have to be remodeled before she even bought the place.  She'd been doing a little research on the side and knew that IKEA's cabinets were tops in quality and reliability. More dependable than custom cabinets and half the cost. She knew what she wanted, but kept pushing it off and waiting for that someday...

How did someday happen? I don't know. The 20% off sale at IKEA certainly helped. 20% off of the best quality and best price? Done. They have a company that will help you design the layout of your kitchen for a mere $179 and provide installation services? Done.  The only wrinkle was that the sale ended in November and we wouldn't be ready to install the new kitchen until February....so we've been living with boxes for months.