March 27, 2005
Our blog is going backwards in time. At the request of Mom Hobbs, I will post our kitchen remodel that we did last year as part of our 15-year plan to stay in our current house until I retire. Before we show you the new kitchen, I need to remind you of what the old kitchen looked like and what we did not like about it. I thought it would be a great adventure to remodel the kitchen, and I wanted to make all the cabinets to save money and to learn a new skill. Here is a great shot of our old kitchen:

The old kitchen looked pretty good when it was all cleaned up. Notice the small 12" tile. I actually laid this tile when we first moved into the house on Sept 21, 1997. I had to remove the linoleum in the kitchen and brown sculptured carpeting in the dinning room. We chose the tile with not much thought except that the color was neutral and it was cheap, $0.99/tile. These are not good reasons for choosing tile, since it is a lot of work to put in!

The white walls and appliances made our old kitchen seem cold. We really wanted to warm up the kitchen, with a more Tuscan feel. The dark cabinets also dated the home, built in 1979. After 25 years, the drawers and cabinets were showing their age. Have you ever had the drawer hardware misalign and continually rub against the cabinet face and make a pile of sawdust? Celestine once started to strip the cabinets to update them for Jared and Jenny's reception. She was going to paint them green, realized we would never finish before the reception, and decided just to touch-up the worn cabinets.

Notice the cell phone charging on the counter. One of the things we did not like about our kitchen was the fact that we had to charge the cell phone on the countertop. In addition, the phone on the wall (below the cabinet in the above photo) needed to be plugged into the same receptacle as the cell phone. We wanted more receptacles. We also wanted to hide the cell phone.

One thing I disliked about our kitchen was the vent above the gas range. The vent returned the greasy exhaust into the room. The plants above the oven, as well as the rest of the plants in the kitchen, had a layer of grease coating the leaves, Yuk! We wanted a vent that would remove smells and grease to the outside of the house (not circulated back into the kitchen). Celestine wanted a larger stove with more room in the kitchen to cook.

Check out this picture dated March 22, 2005. Behind the ridiculously good-looking girls and handsome man is our old refrigerator. We had this refrigerator since 1990. The refrigerator stuck out about six inches from the cabinets. We thought a built-in refrigerator would make the kitchen seem larger.


The next picture shows one of our biggest pet peeves--a broom without a broom closet.

See the broom by the light switch. We knocked the broom over at least three times every day. We wanted to turn the storage area on the left-hand-side of the refrigerator into a broom closet. We would need to make up for the loss of our cabinet space by making the cabinets taller.

Well, I studied how to make cabinets. I downloaded free kitchen architect software to design the new kitchen. I found a friend who was willing to let me use his cabinet making tools. I was ready to design, build, and install my own cabinets. After some serious thought, I decided against it because of lack of confidence and/or ability to do the cabinets in a reasonable amount of time. In addition, I really wanted Cel to like the kitchen, so I decided to contract out the cabinets and granite counter tops to people that have done this repeatedly. Who wants cabinets from a one-time cabinetmaker? Next, I will post some of the kitchen demolition--my true skill.