<p>I just couldn’t stand the kitchen layout of the townhouse. If you look at the kitchen photo with the stove you’ll see that there was barely 36" between the cabinets to move around. Everything was crammed in there. You could barely open up the refrigerator. And you certainly could not open the refrigerator at the same time as the dishwasher. Try that with growing kids :)</p>
<p>In another before photo you can see the wall separating the kitchen and living room. As I said before, some idiot built that wall with only 17" deep. You can’t put any standard cabinets in there. I wanted to blow out the entire wall and build an island there instead. But, there were major challenges. The townhouse is on a concrete slab foundation and the water lines and drain are in the concrete. The drain is located way back in kitchen next to stove. We would have had to cut the concrete foundation and lay new water and drain lines. Not going to happen on our budget. Also, the owner is scared to death of the HOA and didn’t want to do anything they might get upset about. Great, living in the HOA communist regime!</p>
<p>I finally came up with three solutions that will work in our budget and keep the HOA transgressions to a minimum:</p>
<p>1) New kitchen is going to bump out the cabinets about 12" into the dining area. This gives us 48" working room inside the kitchen and does not require any changes in pipes or drains.</p>
<p>2) I convinced her that we could open up half the wall into the living room to promote better natural light in the space and give an improved ‘open concept’. She also wanted to be able to see into the living room to watch her children if she could. This provides a view from the sink area. We had to keep the left wall support because it is holding up two critical structure beams, so we really could only open up a ‘window’ area. I also insisted we needed to be able to have base cabinets under the countertop for better storage.</p>
<p>3) This is the best… We are going to move the kitchen doorway entry from the garage and hall over to the right. Moving the entry to the right 8" or so will give us a recessed wall area of 26" so we can get a counter depth refrigerator on that wall and use standard cabinets for good storage.</p>
<p>I have drawn a rough sketch of the Before Kitchen and a rough sketch of the After Kitchen. It illustrates how there was only one usable base cabinet in the entire kitchen with very limited working space. Owner now has a nice corner Lazy Susan, a large set of drawers for pots and pans, a set of drawers next to sink, trash and recycle pull out area with drawer on top, a tall pull out pantry, and a new set of base cabinet drawers in the outer wall area.</p>
<p>Sketches were loaded to the Flicker CC Remodel Project </p>
<p>I can’t imagine who thought the original kitchen was workable. Clearly they didn’t use a kitchen very often. The new plan is a HUGE improvement!</p>
<p>Yes, I like the blind cabinet pull outs also. They call the pull out shelf thing a ‘half moon’ shelf. We put one of those in the Spanish Bungalow kitchen.</p>
<p>In the right hand ‘no access’ corner I really couldn’t put any cabinet because the ABS drain pipe is coming up from the concrete in that corner and goes up about 12 inches. And a hot water pipe is coming across that corner also. This means that we would have paid for an expensive blind cabinet with pull out shelf and I would have had to modify the whole cabinet and remove the bottom shelf. We decided to just leave as no access corner. We are going to open up the back towards the dining area and create a shelf that sits above all this plumbing, at a very minimal cost.</p>
<p>The “before” design was clearly geared towards someone who ate out of a can and thought that microwave was the only appliance needed in a kitchen. I think you found the best possible solution to make that space useful. I look forward to the updates. </p>
<p>Even more interesting… there was no microwave in this kitchen. And, there was no venting above the stove. The original builder had an aluminum vent system, but it had a cover screwed over it and no vent system in kitchen.</p>
<p>In a discussion with a building inspector once he said they can make people put stove vents in but noone can make them turn it on. So, it really doesn’t matter if the vents are there.</p>
<p>In the case of this property I think a vent was installed but the prior owner took it out or it broke down.</p>
<p>We just finished the kitchen design for the small kitchen in the townhouse. The owner wants a very contemporary modern look for her kitchen with the flat front cabinets, somewhat glossy and contemporary handles. In addition, she needs this project completed within 4 weeks from now (total 6 weeks). It took us 2 weeks to get the kitchen demoed and I had to talk her into modifying the living room/kitchen wall to accommodate deeper cabinets and the refrigerator. Based on only 4 weeks remaining, we need at least 1 week to assemble and install the cabinets and another week for countertop installation, appliances and sink/faucet/plumbing. Just to be safe.</p>
<p>So, based on the fact that we need kitchen cabinets delivered here within 1-2 weeks we really only had 3 choices at this point:</p>
<p>1) Use off-the-shelf cabinets from Home Depot or Lowe’s. These are not the style she likes.
2) Cabinets To Go - they really didn’t have exactly what she wanted and after some serious questions I asked, it was obvious that “Cabinets To Go” really aren’t stored in a warehouse locally. They have to be shipped from somewhere and I really didn’t trust them. Also, there was a very upset couple in the store who had been waiting 5 weeks for their kitchen to show up.<br>
3) IKEA - this was owner’s choice. They have the style she likes, they have a lot of variations and customization that we can do and a lot of cool inserts. She bought their highest quality with acrylic/foil overlay with internal aluminum corners. Hopefully this is not the strange laminate cabinets where the stuff peels off the corner in a cople of years.</p>
<p>Plus, they were having a 20% off sale if you spend over $4,500 for the total kitchen. We were right there at the $4,500! And, they let us go through the store and get all the cutlery inserts, cabinet handles, trash cans for insert, etc. and we got 20% off those also.</p>
<p>Total cost for kitchen, lots of end panels and cover panels, handles, legs, toekick, under cabinet molding (to cover the under cabinet lighting), tons of insert things = $4,024</p>
<p>I know consumer reports gave IKEA high rankings (Although some people hate CR) and people I know have been generally happy. the thing is they must be assembled. </p>
<p>I would not say I hate them, I’m just skeptical of their non-randomised experiments with N=1 when they test something like a vacuum cleaner in their hands. I find that their reviews of a product’s features are pretty valuable, because they are qualitative. Anything that they say about quality has to be taken with a grain of salt because of the methodologies they use. This is just one example:</p>
<p>One of our neighbors replaced their kitchen cabinets from Ikea years ago, they have held up really well. She loves them. They used them in her mom’s kitchen as well a couple of years later. </p>
<p>The very low end IKEA cabinets (white laminate) are made with too much particle board. The main difference is that IKEA uses particle board boxes versus plywood boxes. There are two problems… if there is any standing water that gets inside the box portion of the cabinet, the particle board with swell and disintegrate. The other issue is that the hinges are screwed into these particle board boxes. If hinges get loose or need to be moved or replaced, the particle board doesn’t grip any tightening of the screws. I believe they may have fixed this issue in their newer products. However, many other cabinets on the market are particle board box frames also.</p>
<p>This owner purchased most expensive IKEA cabinets ( Akurum/Abstrakt) which have a solid thick vinyl/foil layer with no seams on the doors and sides. In general, the IKEA drawers and pull out shelf mechanisms are really nice. Not made of wood, but light weight and adjustable.</p>
<p>Lots and lots of assembly time required </p>
<p>She’s going for this contemporary look with the same handles</p>
<p>Why do people replace the kitchen cabinets instead of painting or refinishing them? It seems like so much work. Mine were painted by the prior owner and I really like them. I can tell they’re super cheap but the white paint makes the tiny kitchen look more spacious then neighbor kitchens I have seen that weren’t painted.</p>
<p>Someone’s doing a flip down the street from me. It’s hard to imagine they will recoop the costs - our neighborhood is far from desireable. But they’re removing design elements from the outside of the house - it just seems unnecessary in a tract where all the houses have the same design elements. What would be the purpose of that?</p>
I think you found the best possible solution to make that space useful. I look forward to the updates. </p>
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