Last week I shared with you my disappointment about my kitchen counters.  Now I’m moving on to the good things.  The final cosmetic finishes aren’t yet done but today I’ll share with you some of what I love about my new kitchen!

Since I’m constantly cooking and washing dishes, I didn’t want to have a dish drainer on the counter because it’s constantly being filled and it keeps the counter looking untidy.   The solution – hidden built-in dish drainers.  Yep, two of them.  🙂

Which brings me to the next advantage.  I now have two sinks and they’re both nice and big.  For the first time in many years I have a separate work space for dairy, along with ample storage space for dairy dishes, silverware and pots.  All of a sudden it’s so easy to cook for and clean up from a dairy meal!

Deep bottom corner cabinets are usually very difficult to access, with lots of wasted space. This corner carousel that makes use of all the space and makes it easy to find what I need.

All of the bottom cabinets except one have shelves that pull out so there are lots of drawers.  I strongly prefer drawers.  Here’s what the pull-out shelves look like.

Here’s the only cabinet not to have a pullout shelf and it makes it the perfect place for pantry items.  Since it’s a blind corner cabinet, the storage is about double what you can see here.

Next to the pantry is this cabinet that has a chrome design on the front that none of the other cabinets have.  Wonder why?

Open the doors and you see storage space for vegetables – close at hand but out of sight!  These heavy duty metal slotted drawers together with the special door opening provide air circulation to keep the vegetables fresh.

I asked the person who fabricated the countertops to raise them since I’m tall.  That little bit of additional height makes it more comfortable for me to work at the counters.

I wanted a very light, open look with lots of cabinet and counter space.  At the same time that we have so much more cabinetry in the kitchen, it feels more spacious and open than it did before.

Below is the right side of the kitchen.

The left side of the kitchen that was a holding place for unpacked boxes is now a great work area.

I bought the cabinets used and having all the features I wanted, plus everything fitting into my kitchen space so well is pretty amazing!

The next thing I’m going to do is put up one more top cabinet in the space next to the window (just thought of how to do this yesterday!), then tile the backsplash and cover the toekick.  That will hopefully bring the entire kitchen together.

In the meantime, we’re all enjoying our new kitchen!

Avivah

Renovating the kitchen is creating a chain reaction, as we look for ways to use what we already have to create better storage solutions in different areas!

Here are the rooms that are being shifted around:

1) Younger boys bedroom – even though we lost a bedroom when we moved we don’t feel the lack since their room is spacious with plenty of room for the toys.  The kitchen cabinet set that I bought included a large pantry closet, but I didn’t put it in the kitchen because I felt it would overwhelm the space and make it feels small.  Instead, we moved it to the boys’s bedroom and it’s now a great toy closet.

The new closet replaced the cabinet to the left that used to be our toy cabinet, which has now been moved to yet another room that is in the progress of being reorganized – our soon-to-be home office.

Home office – many people here renovate their storage rooms to use as home offices.  Originally when we discussed this option before moving, dh said he preferred to rent office space somewhere else, but he hasn’t found somewhere to rent and doesn’t want so spend more time looking for a space and then furnishing it.  In the meantime he’s been working from the boys’ bedroom, which was obviously a short term solution.

We’ve decided to convert our storage room to a home office and in the past few days have made big strides forward with this.  It should be operational as a separate work space tomorrow when a separate phone line will be installed.

Ds9 wanted to use the wood from the cabinets to build a desk for dh.  

When he said this, I realized that rather than take the cabinet apart and rebuild something new, we could easily repurpose it.  We used this cabinet since it had drawers at the top, shortened it to be a comfortable height for sitting, took off the doors and after we get the piece of marble slab remaining from the old countertop trimmed, will use it as the desktop.  It looks much better than this now.  🙂  Voila!  A great workspace.  It even matches the storage cabinet above that sits right next to it.

Laundry room – this is such a small area that it doesn’t really deserve to be called a laundry room.  It’s the laundry space.  But it being so small and also being a walk-through to our yard means it’s even more helpful that it’s well-organized.  

We installed one of the bottom cabinets opposite our washing machine, two top cabinets above that, and the last top cabinet above the washer.

There was a final bottom cabinet that I planned to throw away, then realized if we turned it upside down, it would make a great frame for a rabbit hutch (more about the rabbits another time :)).

As we near the end of our kitchen renovation, we have nothing left that will end up in a landfill.  Someone took the second half of the marble countertop and the final boards will be cut down to make additional shelving for one of our clothing closets.  Recycling at its best!

Avivah

Our kitchen is progressing!

We did things incrementally rather than rip everything out at once to minimize the disruption to our lives.

First we took down the top cabinets and put up the new top cabinets.  

Then was the biggest part- pulling out the rest of the kitchen, which meant pulling out the sinks.  It’s inconvenient not having a sink in the kitchen and initially this felt like a very huge disruption to my life.  Then I thought about how for generations people had to go to the river to gather water, or at the least pull it up in buckets from the well, and it put the discomfort of having to walk the extra thirty seconds to the bathroom to wash dishes in the bathtub into perspective.

Once they were out, I told ds7 and ds9 they could take down the tiles on the lower part of the wall before we put in the new bottom cabinets.  They very assiduously agreed to that.

As I did in my last two kitchen renovations, I’m using pre-loved cabinets!  The first time I did this was in 2008 – I bought a set of cabinets that had cost $20,000 ten years earlier, for just $750 – and that price also included the stainless steel sinks, exhaust hood, and washing machine.  They had been very lightly used by the 90 year old seller and his 80 year old wife, and were wonderful quality.  (More details of that here – how to cheaply renovate your kitchen.)

The second time I did this was two years ago.  At that time, a friend who is a real estate agent and knew I wanted to buy second hand kitchen cabinets was in the middle of a disagreement between the seller and buyer of an apartment that threatened to ruin the entire deal.  The buyer insisted they wanted the kitchen taken out before they completed the sale, the sellers refused.  She gave me a call and asked if I wanted free kitchen cabinets.  Win-win-win!  Everyone was happy when I said yes.

Round three and I’m once again doing the same thing.  But this time my  decision to install used kitchen cabinets has attracted much more attention than ever before (this is what happens when your neighbors can see onto your porch and want to know what you’re doing :)).

Why would I buy used cabinets instead of new?  Very simply, because I like quality items that are strong and made to last, and by buying used I can get the quality I want at a price I can afford.  (The carpenter who installed the top cabinets for us told us he couldn’t understand why anyone would want to sell something of this quality and in this condition.)  If I were buying cabinets new, I’d have to spend a bundle of money to get even the most basic cabinets in the quantities that I wanted and with the heavy use of our family, it’s likely they would begin to show signs of wear soon.

How did I find used kitchen cabinets?  I know it sounds like an obscure thing to buy used, but people advertise these for sale online when they’re renovating their kitchens.  I’ve seen kitchens ranging from never used to twenty years old, with price tags averaging from 2500 to 25,000 shekels.

I bought a large kitchen set that included cabinets, two sinks and a large pantry.  The price included the marble countertops but I didn’t take them even though they were top quality granite and I loved the color, since I spoke with professionals who work with marble and realized it would be impossible to refabricate it to match the dimensions of our kitchen.

When I went to take a look at this kitchen I was pleased to see the cabinets were extremely well-made (the owner purchased the home from a very wealthy family who installed the kitchen).  My hesitation initially was that in the pictures I saw, it looked like there weren’t many drawers at the bottom and I strongly prefer drawers.  Imagine my delight when the owner opened the cabinets and I saw that  every single bottom cabinet except one had pull out shelves/drawers!

It’s definitely more work to install used cabinets.  These cabinets were much more complicated to use than any cabinets I’ve worked with before.  Very few of them were standard sized, they varied in depth and height, a number of them had features that meant they could only be use in a particular position and of course, they were customized to the measurements of someone else’s very different kitchen layout.  The trick with used cabinets is to figure out how to fit them smoothly into your kitchen and I really squeezed my head over this!  It took hours and it’s been a relief to see it all coming together.

The other thing about buying used cabinets is that you become the general contractor.  You need to think about what needs to be done, how it should be done, in what order, and bring in people who can do what you can’t/don’t want to do. There are a lot of details involved but I enjoy this kind of thing so I don’t think of it as difficult.

Here are some pictures of the progress.

On Wednesday, measurements were taken for the countertops.   I hope they’ll be installed together with the sinks on Monday or Tuesday.

I still have some cosmetic things left to do – retile the backsplash, buy laminate to cover the outer sides of the cabinets and cover the toekicks.  Once the sinks are in, I need to have some plumbing work done and hopefully it won’t be long before we have a fully functioning kitchen!

Avivah

I’m once again renovating my kitchen!  Yes, it’s been less than two years since I last renovated my kitchen but that was in a different home.

I love, love, love my new apartment!  But the kitchen really needs a major face lift.  Not just for asthetics, but for functionality.  The kitchen itself is a nice size though it currently gives a small impression and the cabinet space is very inadequate for our needs.  These are the basic cabinets installed by the contractor in all the apartments when the building was built fifteen years ago.

Wall number one.  The cabinets are very photogenic and look much better in pictures than in real life.  You can’t see the bottom of the doors flaking, smell the strong scent of mold when opening the cabinet under the sink, or see the toekick area that is missing the covering and as a result attracts lots of small cluttery items.  But even without all of that, this is still the entire working area of the kitchen.

I appreciate having two sinks even if they’re small.  Fortunately the faucet pulls out or I wouldn’t have a way to wash my large pots since they don’t fit inside!  Since I haven’t unpacked my dairy dishes for lack of cabinet space, having two sinks (one for dairy dishes and one for meat dishes) hasn’t been as helpful as it could have been.

(End of Wall 1 where it meets Wall 2.)  Here is the corner of the last cabinet that you could see just half of in the first picture.  Doesn’t make it seem any bigger, does it?  🙂

The space that was allotted for the stove was intended for ovens that are the standard 60 cm wide.  Mine is 90 cm wide, which is why it’s parked at this awkward angle.  To the left of the oven is my temporary solution for where to store root vegetables that don’t need refrigeration.  Next to that is the edge of two large bins of kitchen items that can’t be unpacked due to lack of space.

This is Wall 3.  We put a freestanding cabinet here to create some much needed storage space. It didn’t look especially good there but was extremely helpful until we sold it last week to make space to get started on renovations.

There you have it, the before pictures of my kitchen.

Stay tuned for more details about what we’re going to be replacing this with!

Avivah