People of the internet, greetings and salutations from my little neck of cyberspace. I wanted to write a post and share some exciting news, after 12 years of wanting to renovate our dysfunctional kitchen we are finally able to make it happen and we are going big! We have decided to extend the back end of our house and add on a mudroom, closet and half bath. This will allow us to make our kitchen larger than it currently is because we’ll be able to absorb the old mudroom and pantry into the future kitchen space. We’ve been working with a design/build team since November 2020(!) and plan on breaking ground early summer 2022. When we bought our place in 2010 the kitchen was almost a deal breaker. We actually had passed on the house because of the kitchen and then our realtor asked us to come see it again and we agreed that the house should be ours, and someday we’d remodel the kitchen. I never thought someday would be so far away, but I’m glad it is because now we can really afford to do build a kitchen that we’ll love for a long, long time.

Drink it in!

I’ve been working on my own designs of the kitchen for years, I probably started in 2018 and it’s evolved a lot since. I’m really glad we have taken our time with this because we’ve really been able to soak up ideas and change things around. Our design/build team has been great too, they’ve taken my sketches and fine tuned them adding some great insight and ideas.

Would you like to see some sketchup renderings, because I’d love to share them with ya. Just a little disclaimer, these renderings are not the official drawings, it’s just crazy old me needing to imagine how the kitchen will act and feel from all angles. Some of the cabinetry will be changing size and function, and paint colors are not set in stone, but generally you get the idea of how the space will work. The architectural drawings throughout the post are the correct dimensions for cabinetry, cabinet doors, and drawers.

Our current entrance into the kitchen is a very narrow 30″.

We will remove a few sections of the wood paneling and widen the opening.

This is how it will look from the living room. The living room currently has the same sized opening from the living room to the dining room.

A big change that gives us a lot more flexibility will be moving the placement of the windows in the kitchen. We will be making them shorter and moving them apart to flank the new range and hood. Cabinetry will run the length of the wall below the windows.

The chimney will remain, but we’ll disguise it by installing the pantry around it. Adding some sort of beadboard or v-groove to the facade of the chimney, additionally we’ll add narrow shelving with brass rails creating a place to display artwork, cutting boards, candlesticks, other crap, etc.

Because we are sadly removing some of the wood paneling from the dining room, We will have a carpenter reproduce the paneling on the back wall of the kitchen paying homage to the history of the house and the beauty of the craftsmanship. The paneling will be painted a warm shade of white and will be a very pretty feature in the kitchen.

The far wall in the kitchen will be for dishware and other assorted serving pieces that will be displayed behind glass doors. Below the glass doors will be appliance garage where we will stow daily essential appliances such as the toaster, coffee maker and coffee grinder. The refrigerator will be panel ready and counter depth.

Don’t ‘cha love that view!

We really wanted to include an island in the kitchen. We know that the kitchen will be the heart of our home. We dream of having pals over, hanging out on the island while Jeff serves us cocktails and creates good eats. The apron sink and faucet will make its home as part of the island. The main work flow of the kitchen will be the space created between the island, range, pantry, and fridge leaving the opposite side of the island for socializing and passage from the front of the home to the back.

The mudroom and pantry shown above will become part of the future kitchen with a door leading out to our backyard. The bathroom will be our first EVER main floor bath which will be great for guests, for Jeff’s use when he’s working from his main floor office, and for when we are hanging out in the backyard and we gotta go!

Take a look at that! There will be a built-in storage area for jackets, backpacks, shoes, and so on, but there will also be a closet (door on the left) where we can keep more seasonal items and stow away our vacuum and cleaning supplies. We are insanely excited about this closet as there is no closet on the main floor. Bathroom door is to the right.

The half bath will be a basic two piece bath with a new toilet and vintage sink. I found a sink a while back that will be perfect for the space. The flooring throughout the mudroom, closet and half bath will all be seamless from space to space.

We are so excited to be finally see this dream begin to take shape.

I’m looking forward to sharing much more as things start to pick up steam. Thanks for checking in on my latest proj!