Okay, we are trying to lock in the meeting with the contractor and the cabinet guy to work out final design and timeline for the big remodel of mainly the kitchen, although the front room will be impacted as well, and the flooring of course is both rooms, plus the stairs and loft/landing that leads to the upstairs bedrooms.
Since we can’t actually increase the square footage of the house due to the lot size, we are trying to maximize the space in the kitchen. We aren’t going to change the basic footprint much because any time you start moving electrical and plumbing, you greatly add to the cost and the general layout is not bad. There will be essentially only two structural changes and I’ll post about them later. The kitchen will be gutted though to make the changes and bring in new appliances.
In the model of home that we have, some people use the bay area for a small table and the open area for a small den. When we moved in, we opted to put a small island in the bay area and the dining table in the open space. That was mostly because we had an extra “den set” and we put that in the front room to have two separate seating areas. We have now given away the extra den set and that spot will become the place for the dining table and the corner hutch. We will also move the sideboards to underneath the large window. I’m not quite ready yet to discuss the plans for what will be the open area of the kitchen. I really have to see how the new island that will replace the current peninsula works out before we finalize that. Scale of furniture to the room is important to me. While we will use stock cabinetry as much as possible, we are going to have a few custom pieces put in so that we can utilize the space as much as possible. The cabinet guy will do three 14-inch deep cabinets for the bay area. Fourteen inches isn’t very deep, but that should hold things like odd-sized platters and trays that we use. Those are always tough to store and get stacked up which makes them bothersome to get to. Well, they’ll still be sort of stacked up, but on their sides instead of flat.
