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Kitchen and Dining

This was the monster job! It started with a desire for a bright, large kitchen and dining area to replace the small, separate and darker existing rooms. Once Matt had left home we decided to combine his room and the deck into a single room. This would give us a South and West exposure for maximum brightness, the importance of light being proportional to ones age. We had some general ideas but seemed to have trouble coming up with the specifics. However, we felt that part of the problem was the difficulty envisioning the overall size of the area involved. Some things look good on paper but just don't make it when actually implemented and vice versa. In our attempts to arrive at a final design we even purchased a drawing program - TurboCad - to lay it out. After numerous layouts were done that were 'almosts' we decided to plunge ahead and felt that it would all come together once the actual space was there to be checked out.

To that end, I gutted Matt's room, closed in the outer wall of the deck and then removed the former outside wall between them. The wall to be removed ran parallel to the ceiling joists so no major support structure was being affected. This yielded a nominal 24 ft by 16 ft rectangle... and no further great ideas. We had made up our mind that the dining area would be more or less the West (former deck) side and had installed windows while closing in the area. The West wall received a 48x48 and a 36x48 slider as well as an 18x48 casement while the South wall received a 42x48 slider. Additionally there was a rose patterned octagonal window placed high between the two sliders. This empty space sat for six months while we agonized over the layout, creating drawing after drawing and becoming quite adept at TurboCad. The pantry was in and out 20+ times; the island the same; the appliances moved here and there; the island, when it was in, moved an inch to 2 feet in every direction as it grew and shrank. Boxes were used as cabinets and tables for real life roominess checks. The sink was in the island and nearly every counter, the stove likewise. And all this time the room sat in all it's emptiness. We did clean the area up and have Thanksgiving dinner there, a little (maybe a lot) rustic but roomy, partly an attempt to better determine how much room was needed for fucntionallity of the table and seating. One caveat - if we hadn't still had the old kitchen and dining areas we would have gone nuts. But because we had those, we were able to sit on the project until we were satisfied with the plan.

We finally came up with a layout that we liked, that had all our requirements in it and that we could handle. So next step - we went out for consultation and cupboard selection. The most major concern we heard was about the walk space between the island and the refrigerator. We checked that out with two big boxes, a tape measure and trial and error and stuck with it. We then went to work and ordered the cupboards!

The actual implementation was mostly time consuming - and expensive of course. A new 100 amp sub panel was put in to provide breaker space for the electrical, as well as yielding much shorter branch circuit runs. The kitchen drain had to run 1/2 the width and 2/3 the length of the house in order to reach an available hook up point. An old, existing window on the South wall (formerly in the bedroom) was removed and a new 36x36 casement added between the stove and refrigerator locations. The counters were custom made - all straight - no inside corners - by intent.

The West side of the room (the dining area) was originally the open deck and is not enclosed underneath. To keep the floor warm, it was super insulated with 6 inches of Tuff-R in multiple layers with air spaces and a protective covering. The final floor covering is Wilsonart laminate flooring - the glued variety. The upper walls are a textured wall paper which Nancy painted and glazed.