Kitchen Redesign

The one advantage of living in a house for four years before beginning a renovation is you know what works and what doesn't work. The kitchen in the main house sucks. The cabinets, probably added in the 1970s, don't fit the midcentury aesthetic and the drawers are difficult to open, the fridge thinks it's a freezer, the stovetop is a pain to keep clean, and there's no dishwasher.

What's nice about the kitchen are the views from the sink out across Salinas Valley and from the work area into the living room:

We knew when we started the renovation that we wanted the cabinetry in all of the three buildings to match and we wanted it to be both modern and feel like it was custom, not off the shelf. We also wanted to replace the painted plywood transom doors above the windows with treatments that matched the rest of the cabinetry. We had redesigned our kitchen when we lived on campus using Ikea cabinets which looked great but didn't hold up over the decade we lived there. A few years ago, we found Kerf cabinets online and instantly fell in love with their high density plywood construction and innovative way of eliminating visible hardware. At the time we got a quote for just the kitchen which was over 40K. Ouch. We knew the renovation was not going to be cheap....

When we first met with our contractor, Mike mentioned a local cabinet maker, John Laughton, that we might be interested in. So we asked him to come over to Steinback Mountain and talk about our options. Turns out John's dad was good friends with George Tombleson and Mr. Laughton the senior did all of the cabinets when our house was built. Sorry, Kerf.

So last week we met with John again to get going on finalizing the cabinet designs. Since we had first met, we had spent way too much time online searching for hardware that would fit the vibe we were going for. We knew we were going with walnut doors and drawers  combined with high density plywood framing as we had already framed the new dual paned windows in that treatment (which look really cool, if we say so ourselves). We didn't want to just copy the Kerf look but wanted something that would be as minimal as possible. Last month we returned to the Dwell on Design conference in Los Angeles where we were on a mission to find the final details for the renovation. Although we have picked out most of the materials (slate-like porcelain tile for all the floors, kitchen appliances, kitchen and bathroom plumbing fixtures, etc.), there were still some choices left to be made, like those elusive cabinet pulls. BTW, Dwell on Design can be a very dangerous place to visit before beginning a renovation.

At the show we found a vendor selling contemporary pulls for cabinets. In fact, the company is called Contemporary Pull. Chip found them first and his first thought was, "Oh, crap. Kevin is going to love these and they're not going to be cheap." He was right on both. But the second Kevin saw them, he knew the search was over. While drooling over the samples, we met their designer who shared her story of doing her own kitchen renovation and not being able to find hardware she liked. So she designed it herself and a year later, she has a company and a couple of very happy customers!

Also at Dwell on Design we found another innovative company called Plyboo. We're trying to go as green as possible on the renovation and Plyboo certainly will help. Their products, besides being really cool, are made from recycled and second generation bamboo processing and their Durapalm products are made from coconut palms that no longer yield fruit. At the show, we found a PlybooStrand plywood that is very similar to walnut and even more beautiful. With Laughton's approval, we now have all of our cabinet decisions made. Well, not really. We still have to decide what goes where.
So last weekend we started the process of designing the cabinets which meant finding software that was relatively easy to use and robust enough to do what we needed it to do.

The software we're using is called Sweet Home 3D. It's open source, better than some, worse than others, and FREE! We have the kitchen in the main house done, next comes the pantry, the four bathrooms and the kitchen/bar area in the BBQ room. Hopefully, by the end of next weekend we'll have those done so we can turn the drawings over to the cabinet guy so we can start ordering the plyboo and hardware. Even though we'll be doing the guest house and BBQ room first, to save money we'll be buying everything up front. Thankfully, Laughton Cabinets will be storing all of the materials.
We'll post the rest of the drawings as soon as we get them done....