Red kitchen renovation started
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When to start kitchen renovations in a new house?
Comments (20)Work on your layout as a hobby until you get it right. Post it here for some impartial help. Once you get that worked out enough to know the scope of the project, then dream a while on the finishes. Many times, that's the most flexible portion of the project, and on a long project, a lot of people are already tired of what they picked by the time that the end of the project rolls around. Be sure that your choices aren't just "design ADD" where "oooo I LOVE every zen modern kitchen that I see on Houzz.....look there's a Tuscan one too!" It's fine to have an infatuation with many different looks, but only marry the one that suits your home's bones, and your family's living style. Minimalism is my personal sought after style, and it works with my house, but not as much with my design samples everywhere just this side of hoarding lifestyle. I'm hoping that redoing my home office will help with that, but I'm trying to be realistic by making sure that every single piece of furniture that I own will hold "stuff" and keep it from becoming clutter. Be similarly realistic about your home's bones and living style. A winery in Tuscany might be your retirement home sometime in the future, but decorating a 1980s Colonial Revival like it's that winery will not work with those bones. Maybe a painting of Tuscany, and use some of the colors with traditional wood cabinetry could work....but not the overly faux glazed and faux distressed and grapes and leaves and olives and wrought iron wine caves...etc....See MoreStarting our renovation
Comments (1)No pics are showing up. If you're remodeling your kitchen, I'd recommend posting this in the kitchen forums. It's very active and you'll get lots of feedback and support....See MoreWhere to start? How to plan an unexpected kitchen renovation?
Comments (11)1) First up, don't install the hardwoods yet. Three reasons: a) Find out from the manufacturer of the intended hardwoods if cabinets can be installed on top of them or if the floor should be installed around the cabinets. We're installing a floating hardwood floor, and we were told in no uncertain terms not to install the kitchen on top of the floor because it would cause a "pinch point" where the floor could not expand/contract naturally because it was pinned in place by the weight of the cabinet/counter/sink-full-of-water. That apparently can cause terrible buckling in the floor. If you should not be installing cabinets over your floors, you'd need to know the final cabinet layout before these floors go in. b) Since you are redoing your kitchen, you may end up wanting to widen doorways or open a wall or whatever. You want to lay the floor AFTER these changes are made, or you'll have weird-looking floor patches where the moved walls were. c) You want as much work done as possible before the floors go in because every workman, every tool, every job is one more opportunity for your floors to be damaged. You can protect the floors after they go in, but it's still better to have your framing, electrical, plumbing, insulation, and drywall done before the floors go in. 2) This is related to number one, but don't do ANY expensive work until you have a complete plan for what is going in your kitchen. Down to which lights and where, which size cabinets are going where, etc. What trim, etc. A kitchen remodel is like dominoes -- if one of the first tiles is not placed correctly, the rest can't fall the way you want them to. It is very costly -- in time and money -- to fix an early domino that was placed rashly, and anything you feel like you're gaining by just getting SOMETHING done now will be lost a hundredfold several weeks from now when you have to undo it after a lot of stuff has been installed over it. I really can't stress this enough: No plan? NO work. I know it's really difficult, but try not to let your urgency to restore order dictate what you actually do. You will thank yourself later. 2) As everybody else is saying, argue with your insurance for more money. 3) Start googling and pinteresting and find some inspiration pictures of kitchens you love. Get at least five, but more is better. Then sit down and figure out what are the common threads running through the pictures and how those might be put into your new kitchen. Gardenweb can help you brainstorm about this if you post your inspiration pictures. As you pull pictures, make sure you are going in a direction that fits with the architecture/style of the rest of your house. It doesn't need to be a perfect match to the rest of the house, but it should be compatible. (For example, our place is rustic Spanish-style. I like more clean, simple, and modern places. So for my kitchen, I went with more of the Spanish-revival art deco inspiration pictures -- not incongruous with our building, but also not incongruous with what I like.) 4) Concurrently with fighting your insurance company and looking for inspiration pictures you like, get gardenweb started working on a layout for your space. Post: a) a floor plan of the entire floor of your house where the kitchen is (not just a floor plan of the kitchen -- we need to consider traffic flow, so we need to see where the kitchen is in relation to other rooms in the house) b) pictures of the space (this helps with visualizing things that aren't clear on the floor plan) c) the details of who uses this kitchen and how and what features you like in a kitchen Make sure to include measurements of everything on the floor plan and preferably have the floor plan on graph paper with a 1 sq foot = 1 square scale. 5) Set up a functional kitchenette space in another room so you don't go bonkers in the meantime and you minimize the impulse to make rash, expensive decisions out of frustration. My husband had an old Ikea dresser, and Ikea sells glass tops for their dressers for $30. I put dishes in the dresser drawers, and we use the glass top as a counter top. I bought a $50 hot plate to go on our "counter," and we already had a mini fridge and a microwave. It's not perfect, but we can still eat sort of normally, and it works....See MoreOld rowhome kitchen renovation inquiry...pls help...where to start?
Comments (6)I'm also embarking on a rowhouse kitchen renovation. Baltimore too! I spoke with several renovators who all came back with big budget proposals (wildly beyond what I wanted to spend and didn't include appliances and so forth). My agent then recommended a licensed contractor she uses for small renos and home repairs and I had a long and frank discussion with him and realized that the most cost effective way was to use him as my main builder/installer, while subcontracting out electricity, plumbing, flooring, tiling to specialists. So I'm effectively acting as the general contractor. You can also talk to cabinet stores and kitchen stores like Stuart or Cox and they likely can offer a full remodel too. There's also a few places on the east side of Baltimore, out towards Rosedale off Belair Road or Eastern Avenue. And Ikea / Home Depot. In short, I'd set aside a month or two to talk to as many people to get a sense of what's involved and the costs of everything. It's not for the faint hearted but the more you learn, the more you will also save. Planning is important. Rowhouse kitchens can be frustrating because every square inch counts. And some things will be inflexible or cause problems you may not think of. For example, party walls can be complicated. Old houses often directly plastered the party wall, so there's no framing space for adding wiring or plumbing, so you might need to add a shallow 3/4'' framing against the party wall, then drywall, for your new cabinets and utilities. Then again, maybe not. It depends on what's possible....See MoreRelated Professionals
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I haven't decided on the window treatment yet. I'll have to post a photo of the view from the window, which is of a red bougainvillea. Whatever I do will be minimal, and I might make a Roman shade to fit inside the window, but I plan to have the window uncovered most of the time because no one can see in - the neighbors have glass block windows that obscure any view they would otherwise have of our house.
In L.A., the view from my kitchen window was of the neighbor's garage that had no windows, and so that window was also private, and I could see the creeping fig vine on our wall.
At the Salem Rd house, the view from the window above the sink was of the neighbors' back yard, which was not pretty, and so I kept a shade closed at the window at all times, but the shade still let a lot of light in. There is a bay window at the side of the kitchen, which is where we had our kitchen table, and it had a view of the pool, and so this is the best view from any kitchen that I have had recently.
In Venice, I had a view from my above sink window of the neighbors' patio, and I could open my window and talk to them - fortunately they were very friendly (Loyola Marymount students), and I used to give leftover food to them - they would eat anything and were grateful to get it.In Culver City, before that, I had a view from my kitchen window of Lorimar Studios (before it became Sony Pictures) and the MGM lion, as that studio was originally MGM, until the 1960s or 70s.
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These are essentially the same photo, but I turned off a couple of the under cabinet lights in the second one because of the reflection. The reflection is not a problem in person, and these lights have switches that control the color temperature. I chose the one that seems closest to the overhead lights, and I probably will not change it. 
last monthCongrats! It looks so nice! My feeling about red precedes me, but I have always liked aqua with red. I had just hung this TJ bag in my kitchen, LOL. How nice to be able to enjoy your new space for the holidays, and especially that view.
Hoping too that your health concerns are resolved quickly, that can be so stressful. 🤗
Lars thanked mtnrdredux_gw
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I know that most people will not like red, such as I have used it, but my taste is different from most people's.
While red is really not near the top of my favorite colors, we really did enjoy our Ferrari red Bertazzoni stove, which we sold with the house in L.A. Kevin had picked it out (and paid for it), and at first he wanted to take it with us, to switch with our house on Salem, which has a new Samsung range that I also like, which is all stainless steel. I thought that by having the lower cabinets here in the same red as the Bertazzoni, Kevin would not miss that stove so much, and the red color does remind me of that range.
I won't be doing any more major renovations for a while, even though I'm not thrilled with my new bathroom here - I can live with it as it is, unlike the bathrooms we had when we bought the house on Salem Rd, which I renovated as soon as we moved in, as we did not find them livable. Kevin still likes his bathroom there much better than what he has here, but his is better than the one I have here. I do need to change the fittings in the shower in my bathroom, as the diverter to switch from rain shower to handheld is seven feet high! I don't know what they were thinking when they installed this, and I'm not sure how I will lower it, but I can just barely reach it by standing on tiptoe.
That Sardine shopping bag is very pretty!
Here's another photo, showing pretty much all of the red cabinets:
We received the new microwave today, and I hope it gets installed on Monday. After the walls get repaired, I plan to install a couple of magnetic knife holders.Here is one of the inspirational photos I used:
Cuisine Laquée rouge · More Info
I originally wanted a soft green like in this photo for the upper cabinets but did rejected the first paint sample that I received, even though it was closer to this color.I'm going to wait for the microwave to be installed before I start moving too many things into this kitchen, as I know the installation will create a mess. They have to drill through the cabinet above the cooktop in order to get the venting to go out the roof, like the previous microwave had.
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Microwave oven got installed today, after wall texturing was completed.
This is the new one we bought, and we bought it primarily for looks, as the old one still worked fine. However, the new one is a lot prettier - the old one was solid black and had a handle that stuck out - this one has a recessed handle, and so the front is flush.I installed the racks in the wall ovens and started reading the instructions. As it turns out, it does have a meat probe, and it must also have WiFi because I can get alerts on my phone. I have not installed the app yet. I have to heat the ovens for an hour at highest temperature and clean the interiors before I can use them.
The only things left for the kitchen are the installation of the dishwasher, painting the walls, and installing the switch plates. I might get new ones if I don't like what the installer uses. I also have knife racks to install, and reverse osmosis filter needs to be installed. We had to replace the old one because it leaked.
Here's a photo of some dots that reflected onto the walls and ceiling:
Some of the dots have stronger rainbow colors than others.ETA: As I suspected, the ovens do not have WiFi, and I am okay with that. I do not intend to turn the oven on or off remotely, and when what I am cooking with the meat probe gets to the temperature that I set, an alarm will go off to let me know, and the oven will shut itself off. I do not plan to cook something without being in hearing distance from the oven anyway.
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One of the reasons that I was able to pull this off (which I think I did) is that all of the interior walls of this house had been painted white before we moved in, and so I did not have to worry about beige, although the floor is somewhat beige. However, I think the floor is okay and did not feel the need to change it - plus the floor is the same throughout the house.
Here's a photo of a painting that Kevin did when he was getting his MFA at SUNY Albany:
I think we will hang this in the dining room, which is next to the kitchen. We have not yet started hanging art in this house, and there is a lot of it for us to choose from.
The main thing left for us to do now is to get a new chandelier for the dining room. Here's what we have now:
(MLS photo) You cannot tell from this photo, but this fixture puts out a yellow light.
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LarsOriginal Author