Kitchen Kitchen Kitchen

Okay, so I mentioned in the last post that one of the projects Dad and I recently did was the kitchen. The kitchen has always had issues, largely because when the house was built back in 1873, it didn't have a standard kitchen - given there was no indoor plumbing. And once the kitchen was built to accommodate indoor plumbing, it was really small. While it would be wonderful to tear down more walls and remodel the kitchen completely, we just don't have the time. However, what we do have are new'er' kitchen cabinets Dad bought online.

After finding some L-shaped cabinets someone was tearing out of their kitchen (kitchen remodeling must be the 'in' thing now), Dad thought there was a pretty good chance that they would work in our kitchen. After a debate on whether or not we really should redo the kitchen cabinets (I lost), Dad and I went to work on tearing out the old stuff and went to work on putting in the new stuff.

Once the old bottom cabinets were out, we decided to finish the flooring under the new cabinets since we had extra flooring. Once that was done, the work of bring in the new cabinets and leveling off the floor began.

The foundation work on the south side of the house has been a problem before, large in part to the addition of indoor plumbing. When the owners of the house first added on bathrooms, they were located where the breakfast nook is now, between the kitchen wing and the utility wing on the south side of the house. The problem was when they added them, they failed to pour any foundation beneath them, so the added weight pulled down the dining room and the kitchen. Growing up, I could literally put on my rollerblades and roll down north to south in the kitchen, it slanted that much.

Back in 07 when we tore out the bathrooms and added the breakfast nook - our attempt to help increase the kitchen size, we blocked up the foundation on the sound end of the house and got it about an inch within being completely level. That took care of most of the slant in the kitchen, however on the SE corner there was still a little slant, given there is only crawl space beneath that area and it's not really accessible to get leveling jacks in there. So instead, one cabinet by one cabinet we built up using 2x4s underneath, so when we positioned them on the east and south floors, the counter-tops would be level and would then 'trick' the eye and make the kitchen look, well, like it's supposed to look.

The L-shaped cabinets also helped add storage space to the kitchen, and while the additional space makes the kitchen appear smaller in size overall, the storage seems to balance everything out pretty well. While I still have sections of drywall to put up on the east wall and the marble tile counter-tops to install, overall, this is what the kitchen will now look like.