Best Laid Plans...We Hope!

As I mentioned in a previous post, we decided to keep our original kitchen footprint. Even so, we ended up making some big changes to the layout of the room as well as appliance positions and cabinet configurations. We are hopeful these changes will be all for the best; some we came up with on our own, but we have also been extremely lucky to work with the most excellent Kevin Ritter of Timeless Kitchen Design. Kevin is really an artist, and we feel incredibly fortunate that we will have his work in our home.

Here is a bird's eye view of our new kitchen as envisioned by Kevin (again, apologies all around for the photography):

from the ceiling like Spidey

At the top of the picture is our sink wall; on the right side is the fridge/hutch wall/to dining room; on the bottom, doors to the sunroom/new pantry; and on the left, to the den/oven/cooktop wall. You can see that besides the hood over the cooktop, we only have two upper cabinets on either side of the window over the sink. This worried me at first, thinking we wouldn't have enough storage, but these are huge cabinets--3' by 4', and 14" deep!

One element not in the above plan is our work table/butcher block table that starts right about where the ovens do and runs toward the sink for 76" (47" being work table). So try to picture that in there too.

Let's take a turn about the room, shall we?

oven/cooktop wall

A couple of changes here. Currently we have a shallow pantry to the left of our double oven, but now that we have uncovered our chimney, we are losing that cabinet. Obviously with the removal of the soffit, all of our cabinets will be taller--the oven cabinet is 95" high. We are also ditching our OTR microwave in favor of a real live ventilation system! I hear some of them actually suck moisture, grease, and odors out of the air, but I won't believe it until I see it for myself. We have a lot of drawers here for utensils and pots and pans (you can see by my drawing we added even more); the cabinet at the end is a blind corner with one of these to keep things organized. As things stand right now I have to send R into the corner cabinet with a headlamp and a rope to fish out stray Tupperware lids.

Next:

sink wall

Biggest change here is the dishwasher moving to the left of the sink; to the right will now be a double trash pullout. We are also switching from a drop-in sink to a farm sink. With those uppers reaching just about to the top of the ceiling, I will surely need to stow a step stool here!

Continuing around the U:

Fridge/hutch wall

Ooooh, this is a fun wall! Another blind corner with a contraption inside, and next to that a nice little cookie sheet/cutting board cabinet. That black cavern is actually where the new 36" french-door refrigerator will go, moved from its previous position between the two doors (first door is dining room, other door is laundry room). Now it's in the middle of the action. One of our favorite parts of the new kitchen is something C and I cooked up (haha): the snack station. This massive baby is 71" wide at the base (66" on top) and again almost 95" tall. The microwave will go behind that garage door (next to the tiny black cave); the tiny black cave will be a landing space for the kids' plates and such--plus it will have a hole in the back corner of the countertop for them to throw away their wrappers and other trash, just like Starbucks! The two drawers on the bottom are actually a set of fridge/freezer drawers for all of the kids' waffles, juice boxes, Popsicles, whatever nuggets, yogurt tubes, and perhaps even an apple or two. Their cereals and other snacks will also go in this hutch, effecting a necessary delineation of kid food and grown-up food--they will never eat MY Oikos again!

Finally:

pantry

Not much to explain here, except the two doors on either side are mostly glass, which breaks up the wall more than this appears to. This is our new improved pantry cupboard, 41" wide, 84" high, and 21" deep. We'll have a couple of roll outs, and some drawers and some adjustable shelves. It will be nice to have most, if not all of our dry goods in one place. We currently have a cool antique Hoosier cabinet here; this will move into the sunroom on the other side of the same wall.

So there you have it: plans for our new kitchen. I'll discuss colors and finishes in a future post--thanks for reading!