Sawdust
It was a simple addiction at first. A few pieces of furniture here and there soon progressed to remodeling two houses and building one from scratch. Tool purchases can always be justified: you just have to find a project for them!
A lot of work went into this new kitchen before it reached this stage, ready for cabinet construction and installation. It started out as an open-air breezeway between the house and garage. After building end-walls, installing windows and doors, insulating the ceiling and walls, putting in an amazing radiant floor (I took photos of the radiant floor installation but have since lost them! Urg!), and running electrical and plumbing, we have a clean empty room in which to design and build our new kitchen.
The corner base cabinet for the sink and the lazy susan barely fit into the kitchen. It wouldn't fit through the 32" garage door where it was built and had to be carried through the snow to the 36" backdoor for some very careful manuvering to get it inside.
What started as a pile of Maple plywood in the middle of the radiant floor, slowly gets turned into the cabinets you see in the next photos. I managed to parlay this "little" project into the purchase of a few new tools as well ;-)
Painting in place was a lot of work, but without having a shop it was still the best bet.
The steel framework to support the granite countertop over the peninsula is in place. We decided to paint all the appliance areas flat-black for a better finished appearance with the appliances installed. Note the chamfered corner on the peninsula cabinet. All of the corner cabinets had this feature. It really made for a nice look on the crown moulding.
In the new end-wall to the back yard we put in a big window next to the door, and this brought in tons of light as well as giving us a small breakfast area with a great view of the garden and its shed. We added even more storage with another built-in there, doubling our pantry space. Lisa really appreciated this extra cabinetry for storing dishware and other things not used on a daily basis. By using this extra bit of space for a built in we gave this tiny kitchen a ton of storage space.
Before the pine trees were taken down in the front yard, they made a great paint booth. Some 3/16" aircraft cable was strung between them and the seemingly endless array of shelves and doors were painted in the early Spring mornings before the bugs came out.
I installed Pergo flooring and a tumbled marble backsplash, but we had professionals install the granite countertops. Here is our small but very comfortable kitchen. I'm not sure why but using the flash makes the curtains look black; they actually were a bright barn red.
Here you can see the peninsula and the pantry cabinet.
Here's how that back window area turned out, and the view from just outside it on the deck.
With the new kitchen complete, we tore out the old one in the adjacent room and started remodeling there. Here's the old kitchen front wall. The second picture shows that same wall after we removed everything down to the studs, then took out the whole front wall, reframed it, and installed a nice big window. It made a huge difference to the house, bringing in light from both directions where there had been none before.
With the kitchen re-built in the old breezeway and the old kitchen turned into a front living room, the entry into the house was so much better and the whole house was much brighter and lighter. It was a lot of work, but really made the little house nice.
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