I may not be able to do math in my head, but I still enjoy doing it — there’s something satisfying about writing out the calculations, however inconsequential, and seeing numbers add up just so. It feels like organizing the world…assuming I’m doing it right, that is. Right now, I’m at about 3/4ths of teh way through phase 2 on the renovation.
First, immediate tasks on the horizon are:
- measure & install pull-out shelf in tall cabinet, for toaster oven & toaster
- remove top shelf in high cabinet and reinstall several inches higher, plus second shelf above toaster/s, to make room for microwave
- build up frame for enclosing top of tall cabinet with gypsum
- put up cleats along wall & ceiling for minimal soffit line
- build, wire, & install soffit along south & east walls of kitchen
- cut, dye, seal & hang shelves and window sill
Design for open shelves and the window sill/frame: I’d like to do a moulding along the walls in all rooms that run at door height. This gets into the question of what I’d not really considered before hitting this point (well, I did, but not deeply), of how to merge what’s in one area with what’s elsewhere, the concept of architectural thematics. It’s all well and good to think of how room colors in one room look against sighted colors elsewhere (which I’d considered at length, while debating colors), but the bones of each are important. So, having moulding in one room that’s traditional floor/chair/plate/ceiling and then Prairie-style elsewhere… seems kinda clashing, even if it’s not something 90% of folks might consciously notice.
Reason for bringing that up: whether I should make the window uprights 4″ wide, to match the horizontal line at the top being 1×4″ moulding, and whether this should be carried all the way across the window (instead of ending at the upper left when meeting the vertical border of the window). That would also mean the frame’s angle goes from 4″ to 1″, a stronger slant than I’d planned, or I could do 3″ rising to 1″ depth, but that means reducing the window sill at the bottom-left by an inch.
I’d decided on doing a slant because then the vertical frame-sections can be cut in pieces (easier for me), and they’d also provide additional support for the window-end of the shelves, help brace those puppies (and hide the additional support so the shelves look like they’re floating). But if the slant would look strange (?), then I could just as easily do it with verticals only 2″ proud, and just take them down to 1″ at the very top where they’d meet the moulding.
Trying to visualize, in an 8′ ceiling’d room, whether a 1:20 slant would make the room ceiling look taller, or would it look awkward & contrived, or would it look like I want.
2. Raise the countertops and extend outwards to cover dishwasher edge. Issue: current sink is 8″ deep & it hurts both our backs to lean over when cleaning, and the sink we’ve picked is 10″ deep. Plus, CP’s reach is more comfortable (at 6′2″) with countertops 42″ high, while I’m okay with 36″ high. Also, the dishwasher sticks out from under the counter by about 1 & 3/4″. A want, not need, is to have the dishwasher raised as well, because my back does twinge after enough bending up and down to load the lower rack — it’s not a truly painful thing, it’s just something that if I could avoid, I’d rather, and why not?
I came up with a basic idea of how to raise the countertops using 2×4s and plywood, using the existing carcass as the foundation/stabliizing. (That picture’s a great example of me thinking in pencil, bwah, the math!) It’ll take some doing to arrange sink removal, countertop installation, dishwasher removal, new sink installation, but the issue is more of: what do I do about the 6″ change in height from the existing countertop to the new height where the sink begins? I’m not sure. On the six inches of rise between original level and raised section, should I:
- Make the rise the same concrete as the countertops, and just round off the top edge?
- Make the rise out of wood stained to match the cabinets?
- Cover the rise with some kind of fancy, accented tile?
…which shows how the countertop would jut out around the sink and dishwasher, and then (somehow) scoop back or slant back to the original 24.5″ depth of the tall cabinet at the top-right corner in the graph. I’m not sure whether to do that line (to the left of the sink) as a straight line from back to front, or slant it, or do it as a curve. FYI, the sink we chose has an elliptical curve at its outer edges, and I thought I might echo that. But it straightens at the bottom-left — and I don’t like sharp/right-angles in a kitchen where you can catch hip or waist or knee on the damn things. I’m not sure whether the line slanting back to the tall oven cabinet looks awkward, either. Anyone?
2b. Center the sink? Issue: original sink, standard double-bowl width of 32″. New sink: 28″ wide. Hrm.
Keeping the faucet centered at the window is no problem. I just move the sink 4″ to the right, shove it the absolute closest to the dishwasher it can go, and the farthest left cut-hole in the sink would keep the faucet squarely on center of the window — but then, do I raise the countertop to remain centered under the window, or do it w/in 2″ of sink as would be regular, or center the countertop-step-up relative to something else?
Or I could center the sink under the window, which would give me four inches between the dishwasher and sink (instead of the standard 2″) — but that still leaves the question of where to do the step-up so it doesn’t look off-balance. Or, if it’s asymmetrical, that it looks purposefully so. Guh.
After I’ve got those above figured out, then it’s:
- Do the concrete coating for the countertops.
- Strip the vinyl flooring. (Oh, man, this part is gonna be hell.)
- Lay down cork flooring (no better flooring for kitchens, honestly).
- Strip off moulding around pantry door, and rehang it so it’s a sliding door to the pantry’s interior. (Right now it opens up to block the oven cabinet.)
- Build out the kitchen into the garage just 36″, and replace hollow-core outswing door with proper steel inswing door. (Make those firemen happy!)
- Test expanding-foam retrofitting insulation on pantry walls, see if it helps. (Yes, our house has NO insulation. Cripes.)
3. How to cover the exposed side of the fridge?
This is where phase 3 begins. I can’t take the wall down completely, because we’ve got electrical & phone coming down and that requires a beam or carrier of some sort for the wires. So I figure, a stretch for the phone/electrical, and at least one upright remaining at the island, to carry the electrical to switch & plugs on the kitchen side of the island.
The fridge sits at an angle behind the left-hand archway entering the kitchen. Opening up that wall means you’d be able to see the fridge’s side angling away from you. I had the idea of doing a series of open shelves (vertical support, with glass shelves at various levels, and a single spotlight pointing down.
Those shelves would really be more for display, not being that wide nor deep for anything but geegaws and little things we want to see but don’t want to dust. The angled shelf, at the lower-right corner, would be open, for display of big things that get used to any degree, like table stuff or serving bowls, etc. The shelf that opens into the kitchen, flush with the fridge’s side, is for cookbooks. The entire idea is that as you stand in the foyer, you’d see the leading edges of the display shelves (and the light coming from it) but without a full view of what they hold. I rather like the idea that you must enter further to see what’s there. That’s my idea, at least, but I’ve not seen anyone do anything like it, so I don’t know if it’d look strange, or good, or what.
The other idea bouncing in my head is to forgo the place for cookbooks (though it would be handy) and just do a floor-to-ceiling screen that hugs the fridge’s angle. A simple gridwork, probably. The bonus here is that it’d open up the archway from current 31″w to way above 40″w, giving me room to play on the island side without cutting into traffic pathway.
4. Putting shelves in the dining-room end of the island. Issue: walls are nominally 4.5″ (2×4 plus drywall). I added more wood to the beams to make deeper arches, bringing total thickness to 8″. If I remove that added depth, the shelves — which would’ve stuck out in front by about four or five inches — will now stand proud by about nine or ten inches. Yikes. I like the cantilevered look, but not so much the “walked around the corner and caught my knee on the shelf edge for the fourth time today” look.
If I splay the kitchen-window frame, maybe I could do that for the beams — and add false legs to the island (dishwasher-facing end) to carry the style around as though it were true casework, such as the following modern ‘asian fusion’ cabinetry by some big cabinetmaker whose name I can’t recall, and the other a traditional Prairie-style cabinet. With those, and using the basic 1:20 slant currently as working idea for window-frame, I came up with a design that might look cool. I think it might also look hellacious. (See the current arches as example of How Sometimes, the Lizard Knows Not Cool Ahead Of Time.) I do like the peculiar balance of the legs coming inward only to spread again at the top. What I’m undecided on is whether to let them go out to the side, to the front, or both (which would be much harder to work, but possible). It really depends on which you consider ‘the front’ of the piece: is it the view of the shelves leading into the dining room, which might be ‘yes’ since that’s the view you can see from the most angles, sort of the ‘presenting’ face… or is it the side facing the fridge and/or garage? The ‘long side’ of such casework usually gets the outward slant, to emphasize it.
Although, if I do shallow, angled shelves around the fridge (or even a simple screen), I could stretch the legs to a slight slant. (The 1:20 means the base would come out about 4″, roughly, so the base would be about 8″ by 8″ (if splayed on two sides), and at the very top would be 4″ by 4″. I’m not sure whether that looks too much, balanced, or so little it looks more like a mistake. Placing it against the protrusion of the shelves, though, it’d at least cover how much they stick out, make them look less obtrusive. I think.
5. Confirm design for shelves at ceiling-level in dining room.
Things of note: for the average suburban 8′ ceiling’d house, the top ledge of the usual contractor-grade moulding is 13″ from the ceiling. This puts the finished doorframe at 16″ from the ceiling, and that becomes my standard for what the limit of an drop for overhead shelves, beams, or arches. For the majority of our old books — most which don’t top about 10″, this will be fine; those books can also handle having 4″ of that (from the kitchen/DR exposed joist) being blocked.
I’ve considered simple lattice-screens, or larger regular squares lined by rice paper: the issue is mostly that the books need to be out of direct sun (which the dining room gets pretty much none of), and getting air around them as much as possible, so nothing annoying can grow in the damp dark places at the backs of shelves. This isn’t exactly it, but it’s pretty close to the way I’d like these ceiling-shelves to look from the kitchen or the foyer/hall, since those are two places where you’ll be able to look up and see rows of… the backs of books. (Real thrilling, I know.)
I’ve done a whole bunch of fiddly doodles for the shelf design, before settling on simple torsion boxes. That means less visible support required, since a torsion box can take a crapload of weight without sagitude. The shelves on the kit/DR wall, and the DR/LR wall, will be 10″ from the ceiling; the other two will be 13″ to allow for bigger books. I did figure out a way to make this look like it’s on purpose…but I’m not sure whether I’ll do the cloud-lifts. It might look cool, but it might also be too much., especially if every support beam got them on both sides.
If I do a moongate at the DR/LR archway, that might be enough of a curving statement that everything else should remain simple and restrained straight-angle geometry. If I don’t bother with such a large, emphatic circle, then the cloud lifts would be a smaller, curving version of gridwork elsewhere. Not sure.
6. Settle on gridwork pattern for screens….assuming I do screens with grids.
Tagged: construction, future plans, geometry, kitchen, occupying space