Mudroom

As you may recall, we closed up a doorway in the kitchen during that remodel and busted a hole into the porch/soon to be mudroom.  Here are the original photos of the porch:

Notice the lovely window into our living room

 

In one quick weekend Matt was able to transform the porch to this:

We worked with our favorite handyman Dave, to rebuild the porch.  From framing, HV/AC window install, siding and drywall, just a quick couple of weeks, and we were here:

All we needed to do after this was add the barn door, cork flooring (we used Lumber Liquidators) and our special lighting, vintage from Grandma and Grandpa Wachter. Here's the mud room in the current state:

We plan to add some cabinets and storage bench sometime early next year, so stay tuned...

Kitchen Renovation : Completed

After three short months we went from this:

To this:

Next up, building a mudroom out of a porch

Kitchen Phase 5, Cabinets

Once we had our new (and gorgeous) floors installed it was time to tackle the kitchen cabinets. Because we had removed all the existing cabinets to create a clean slate, we had a lot of cabinets to buy and a modest budget to do it on. Our first instinct was to go with IKEA cabinets which have a reputation for having very solid boxes that are DIY friendly, but after months of building virtual rooms at ikea.com and visiting the store we decided that they weren't quite what we had in mind. The process of the designing the room with the online tool about 100 times did however get us to a point where we knew exactly what we wanted for a layout, so when we found the perfect slab style cherry cabinets from Thomasville at Home Depot we could tell the kitchen designer exactly what we wanted. To top it off because of an amazing sale at the store we got 30% off of our cabinets and countertops which let us upgrade to quartz for the countertops and fancy storage inserts.

All that was left was for us to install the cabinets ourselves.........NOT! We know our DIY limits and installing thousands of dollars of cabinets and doing fine finish carpentry is outside that scope. Luckily for us, Home Depot provides very reasonably priced installation services that include a warranty. 

A few weeks later Mike, our installer, showed up and made quick work of hanging the cabinets, installing door hardware (from IKEA), and adding custom trim details to make everything look polished.

 

All that was left was to install our "Yukon Blanco" quartz countertops add a backsplash, and get the plumbing to work.

Kitchen Phase 4, Tile

When it came time to select our flooring our initial thought was to go for cork because it is easy to install, comfortable to stand on, and we fell in love with dark rich variety. When we set it next to the wood cabinets that we were debating on buying, we realized that we would be making the room a cave with all of the dark brown towns, so we took a detour down the tile isle at Home Depot. There we saw a lot of nice tiles in grey tones like our inspiration room, but none we perfect so we began our hunting expedition. After Home Depot we tried a half dozen specialty tile shops which all had beautiful and insanely expensive tiles. Then when we were about to give up we stumbled on Maloney Tile, which is basically a small house that is jam packed with tile and there we found our winner, a 12 by 24 inch grey porcelain tile from Italy.

After selecting the tile, it was a simple matter of building a new subfloor, adding a waterproofing/decoupling membrane (rather than cement board), renting a tile saw, laying the tile, and grouting it.

 

In one Saturday we went from no floor to this perfect base for our new kitchen cabinets.

Kitchen Phase 3, The Rebuild

After thoroughly destroying our kitchen including removing walls and doorways, we realized that we needed to start putting it back together and the first order of business was to have Handyman Dave install a new (orange) exterior door and add a temporary door to the 3-season porch (soon to be mudroom).

With that done, we figured that we should replace the gaping hole at the top of the basement stair before one of us met our maker.

To fix the hole, Janine got our her trusty and relatively foolproof miter saw to craft a rock solid platform to replace the asbestos cover one that had been removed. After a few screws and a topping of plywood we had access to our basement back

With that safety hazard taken care of we began the process of closing off the kitchen from the basement stair and re-drywalling the kitchen (Matt did a bunch of boring electrical work including multiple inspections from the City before this step). We quickly learned that we are both slow and terrible at drywalling. After numerous nights of labor the kitchen still looked like this:

Not pretty but at least it is starting to look like a room, if not a kitchen.

Kitchen Phase 2, Demolition

As mentioned in the previous post the kitchen layout was atrocious, so we began our demolition journey by punching a hole into our 3 season porch to connect to the basement and door to the driveway. This space will be our new entryway from the side of the house into what will be a sun and mud room area.

Kitchen Phase 1

Having gone almost 6 months without a major home improvement project we were itching to put a hole in a wall, especially a kitchen wall. Our kitchen, while usable, is the most poorly designed room in the house. The room measures 11'x11' with all of the cabinets and counter on one wall and all of the appliances on another wall. The result is that prep work is done on one side and then food is carried across the room to the stove, which is not an efficient setup. To make matters worse, the there is a door to the basement and window that sits low to the ground making a large part of the room unusable. Did I also mention the original 1950s red laminate counter top, cheap vinyl floors and dated appliances?

In order to maximize our space we decided to do a full gut renovation removing everything, closing off the door to the basement, and raising the window above cabinet height. We figured that if we are going to do it, we are going to go all the way.

After reading a few hundred kitchen magazines, design books, and blogs we decided on a general theme of clean contemporary lines with rich warm wood cabinets and crisp cool surfaces.

With these inspiration rooms in mind, all we have left is to destroy the current nightmare of a kitchen...