If I could remodel a kitchen however I liked, what would I do?
Mother's kitchen cries out to heaven for remodeling. It's an old house, maybe from the 1940s, and a lot of it is original. Like the cabinets. Well, they suffice I guess except that they don't really have as much room for things as one needs to have. At least half of the space is completely out of reach up at ceiling height. As I have said many times, "Kitchens are built by very tall people...with beards." Let's discuss the cabinets first.
So often when one visits the home improvement store to select cabinets, they want to sell you things that aren't cabinets, but cabinet looking things. The shelves are at most 12" deep. Oh yeah, the plates are more than 12" wide. They won't go on the shelf. Neither will the pots and pans. What are those cabinets going to be for? Oh, put cans on them! OK, so then you have a shelf at the only level you can reach that is about 14" high, and all the space is taken up with a 3" can.
Well, I could go on. My dear husband and a carpenter were planning my new kitchen once, and, oh, it wasn't going to be very large. They showed me the plans. See? Plenty of space to squeeze in and get to the sink. The stove here, the refrigerator here. In between the stove on one side and the refrigerator on the other was about 2'. "How do you open the stove or refrigerator?" I asked. Good question. So many kitchen plans look like nice places to pop in a TV dinner or have toast. That's about it.
So, if ever one needs to live large, I'd say it's in the kitchen. The kitchen should be about half the house. With a big kitchen you can even have a space for shelves to have a garden. Herbs, sprouts, all sorts of things. Why, the kitchen would pay for itself!
OK, maybe not, but this is the heart and soul of the house and the more wonderful the better. It's not the place to skimp.
So, what's the plan? Well, I guess the appliances could stay. There would be a dishwasher, that's for sure. There would also be an exhaust fan over the stove.
Fine. What's my biggest complaint about this particular kitchen? Number one, the ceiling. It's a fright. I want to have a nice new ceiling, with recessed lights and a few other lights, all that have ordinary light switches on the wall that can easily be turned on coming in the kitchen door or out the back door. And this ceiling will be a dark green. Dark green?! You heard me. The door will also be dark green.
Now, the walls. Currently, they are adorned with the wood panelling one sees sometimes in mobile homes. I really don't like this. Too dark. Just regular sheetrock painted white, or powder blue, or maybe peach. Peach would be nice with the dark green ceiling and door. No, I think light blue. You don't know what you're doing! Blue doesn't go with green! Well, I like it.
The floors will be dark green tile. Right now Mother has a wood stove built on a rock hearth. It's OK I guess. I think the idea in someone's mind was that in the event of disaster the kitchen could be warmed with wood, which is abundant. OK. But then it takes up a third of the kitchen, and really more since there's also a woodpile in the kitchen. Hmmm. Be that as it may. Oh, and the stove has two places on top where one can "cook." Problem. In the winter. In the summer no can cook. It's just used to keep a pan of water on to humidify the room. My suggestion is to have a campfire outside in the event of disaster.
The stove is also bad to cause little fires on the floor, which you could clearly see this place is a fire hazard already. Light one match and it's poof. The solution at the present time is to put a big plate on the floor in the winter, which is then a fall hazard. So the tiles would at least keep the fire and fall hazards down if the wood stove must stay. Oh, this will be the place to be in event of disaster.
I don't like the way all the firewood around the house has attracted termites either.
So that takes care of the appliances, the ceiling, lighting, walls, floor and door. Now the fun part, the windows and cabinets.
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