Have you ever thought about remodeling? It can be a scary proposition, filled with pitfalls, unknowns, and uncertainties. The number of choices is infinite, cabinets, countertops, appliances, floors, light fixtures, hardware and so much more. Over the years I designed and built two houses. As a non-practicing architect, I liked to think that I was an informed customer. Wrong! I had not yet met the exploding oven. 

In order to escape sky high real estate taxes, I sold my house in the New York suburbs after several failed deals and many price reductions and bought the most charming cottage 20 miles away in Connecticut. It had two fieldstone fireplaces, a stream, stone walls, lots of glass in a wood paneled room and lovely views. The problem turned out to be that even 20 miles was too far. I wasn’t near public transportation. My kids, who live in the city, couldn’t get to me. And every time I wanted to see a friend, that 20 mile stretch of highway turned into 40. After a year, I knew I had made a mistake and it was time to cut my losses and move on. Three deals later, I accepted an offer which was significantly less than I had paid a year before. I figured that there wasn’t much point in waiting for the market to come back.  As they say “a rising tide carries all ships” (or something like that). Prices were only going to go back up in the other market as well.

Prices were still high at the other end and I looked and looked, but the reasons I had left were still there, high taxes, high prices. Finally a house which we had seen early on in our search had a big price reduction. The house was an ordinary 1950’s split, except that it sat about 15 steps up a steep flight of stairs from the street. But the neighborhood was good, the commute excellent, it was surrounded by a greenway, good for dog walking, and I figured it was the best option I had at the time, so I bought it.

The kitchen was the original 1957 kitchen and the oven the original gas oven. What I didn’t realize was that the way the oven went on was that a glow plug like device in the lower oven slowly heated up. Meanwhile the oven filled with gas until . . . “POW”. . . it exploded.

Had my kitchen been laid out in the most efficient way, I likely would have been able to just replace everything in the same place. But with this kitchen, it was so inefficiently laid out that the first thing I had to do was to plan where everything would go. Being an architect, this was something I was able to do, but I also found a very good kitchen designer at the big box store where I ended up buying the cabinets and she would have done an excellent job had I not had some experience.

There are lots of things that are important, but not obvious. I didn’t want to have to pull a building permit, knowing that that would have an impact on my taxes. So I decided that I wouldn’t change windows or doors, which would only require my electrician and plumber to need permits for the upgraded systems (yes, when you renovate an old house, you are going to have to replace old wiring and plumbing). And any permits require that you meet current codes for the areas being affected, so be prepared to have to add outlets or plugs, or make sure that they are GFI (Ground Fault Interrupted) outlets to prevent electrocution in wet areas.  Even if everything could have been replaced in place, it is still likely that circuits would have had to have been upgraded

My next consideration was what I wanted in the kitchen. Since the current plan had almost no usable countertops, I wanted working countertop areas. I like to bake and having looked at the current double ovens below cooktops which require you to bend to the floor to get things in and out of the bigger oven, I decided that I wanted double wall ovens. I debated how big the cooktop should be and settled on 30 inch versus 36 inch, because I needed the microwave to be above the cooktop and act also as the exhaust fan. I would have liked one of the fancy exhaust hoods over the oven, but decided that I didn’t really have the space to give up. I choose a big multi-storage food pantry unit, which I knew would be a more expensive cabinet, but which offered the maximum food storage. I also choose to have a cabinet containing two waste baskets, one for food, one for recycling. The rest were standard 4 drawers or typical base cabinets. For the upper cabinets, my one luxury was a corner cabinet that opens fully to access all parts of it.

Everything I did was tempered by my budget. When I bought the house, I took advantage of lower interest rates to take out some extra money to do some work on the house. Once the oven issue arose, and given the kitchen configuration, I knew that the money would have to go towards a new kitchen. I had to decide where it mattered to me to most. Was it cabinets, appliances, countertop, floors? I went to Home Depot to look at Kraftmaid cabinets, which I had used before. They were having a sale on a certain door style, which offered 15% off the whole order, in addition to more savings depending on the total of your order. I liked itCertain items, like glass doors, add significantly to the cost. Other items, such as all plywood construction, as opposed to pressboard, add to the cost, but contribute, I feel, to the life of the cabinets. I opted for increasing the quality and choose to keep the fancy cabinets to a minimum. The one cabinet that I choose to spend more on was a multi-storage pantry, where the shelves swung out and reveal shelves behind. I figured this would be my main food storage unit.

Just after I selected the cabinets, I walked over to the tile department, just for the heck of it. And there was a tile with a combination of browns and grays that was a perfect match for the cabinet. At the time I was thinking that I would do a black granite countertop, something like an Absolute Black, and that the floor, with it's swirling pattern would be perfect. So I dragged home hundreds of pounds of tile and plopped it in the garage. Probably that wasn't the best way to select floor tile, because when I finally picked out the countertop, an elegant piece of granite at the top of my budget, in shades of grey to black with a touch of red and browns thrown in, the floor wasn't rally right anymore.

I moved on to appliances. Appliances are pricey, no matter what you choose. I decided that this was a once in a lifetime purchase, and while I couldn’t afford Viking,  Subzero or Wolf, I thought that the Kitchenaid Architect’s Series was a simple, elegant line of appliances. I searched the internet for pricing and eventually went to a very established local appliance dealer, whose prices matched anything I could find. I threw in a new garbage disposal and my purchases there were done. While the exploding oven was a gas oven, I'm just an electric oven type of girl, and one with convection would be sufficient. While the second oven is usually just a storage place for the pans that fit in the first oven, I just like to imagine that I'm going to cook for enough people to require two ovens. I couldn't, though, go with an electric cooktop. Since my space was still limited, I found a 30 inch cooktop with five burners. I wanted a counter depth refrigerator. (It's not really counter depth, but without counting the handle, it's 27 1/2 inches deep. A typical counter with a 1 1/2 inch overhang is 25 1/2 inches deep, so the refrigerator will come 2 inches in front of a counter. This compares to a standard depth, which is 31 inches without counting the handle.) I was surprised when the oven and microwave were installed to see that even with the fancy KitchenAid appliances, the literature was printed on the cheapest newspaper type paper. It used to be that you got a nice operating manual with some recipes and hints. It kind of makes you feel like you bought a cheaper level of appliances when the supporting cast isn't up to the main performer. It also turns out that there are things you don't even think about which will make life more inconvenient. It turns out this oven only has one timer. My sister and I are used to double ovens where you can time each oven separately, especially on an expensive appliance. I also found that the element on the interior is quite crooked. I hope it will work fine, but I'm not impressed with the quality control.

I've always been a Kohler fan. In the one bowl vs. two bowl sink discussion, I have found that two bowls really don't fit bigger pans. The smaller bowl tends to be just for the disposal and the bigger bowl isn't big enough. I found a big, deep sink, from Kohler, with a very flat rim. The sink could be either a drop-in, meaning it sits on top of the countertop, or an undermount, meaning it is installed below the countertop. While I know that undermount is popular, I have never really liked it's appearance as well, so my decision was to install this sink as a drop-in.

While all this was going on, I needed to find a contractor. I got recommendations from family and friends who had actually done work or could introduce me to people for whom these contractors had done work. I picked three, feeling that if their prices were very far apart I might have to talk to more, but if they were close, then I felt comfortable selecting one of those three. I got prices from all three, they were close enough that I was comfortable that that was the range I would be in. The labor was approximately equal to the price of the cabinets and all appliances (not counting countertop). I spoke to references and selected one.  I was a little nervous with my choice, since the contractor I picked was used to doing very high end homes and was, I felt, only taking this job because the economy was so bad. While I thought I detected a slight note of condescension , I was also reassured by the references that his work would be of the highest quality. It turned out that he was really an out-of-town contractor. He sent people to my house, but he was doing a job hundreds of miles away and was pretty much gone Monday - Friday, and even when he was home, he didn't want to meet. We interacted pretty much on the phone. It wasn't a problem until the cabinet installer arrived. Even then it went pretty well until I discovered that his lovely, but inexperienced, assistant, didn't know up from down and right from left. The handles on my cabinets were so crooked that I came home that night and burst into tears. I saw the template that they were using to drill the holes for the handles. There were two sets of holes drilled and a piece of wood that was laid against the side of the door. Unfortunately, when you laid the template and drilled the holes, one hole was about 1/8" farther from the edge of the door than the other. They did quite a few this way before someone must have realized that this was how crooked everything looked. Then they drilled another set. They were straighter, but they weren't on the line that would have centered them from the edge of the door properly. When I called my long distance contractor, he said something like "Oh, they haven't had a chance to fix them". They shouldn't have needed to be fixed. Walls can be off, floors not level, ceilings sag, but putting a handle on a door so that it's straight with the edge isn't rocket science. You need a contractor who is going to be on site, managing their subcontractors.

They started with a roar, by the end of the first day the kitchen was gone, the walls were ripped off and the floor was now covered by a new layer of board waiting for tile. The problem was that the tile that I had dragged home from the big box store didn't look as good to me once I had selected by countertop, an Italian granite called "Capolavoro". So I took a Friday off from work and ran all over, dragging tile samples 20 miles to the countertop, since I couldn't bring a slab of granite 9 foot by 6 1/2 feet with me. I ended up selecting a floor in a local tile store and they said "if you buy it right this second we can get it shipped in for Monday".  I bought it right that second, paid in full and waited. Monday came, no tile. "Oh, we're so sorry, it didn't get on the truck but it will be here Wednesday". So my contractor had some other trades come in and when it arrived on Wednesday he drove up to pick it up. I looked at the tile Wednesday night and got quite a shock. All I had seen was one tile as a sample. I knew there would be variation between tiles, but I didn't expect what looked like misprinting and bowing sides. So I dragged several hundred pounds of tile in from the garage to the den and sorted every one of 160 pieces and made piles of those that I wanted them to use where I would see them, and marked those that would be hidden under cabinets where possible. When I got home from work Thursday they were just starting to install the tile, when the tile contractor picked one up and said "We can't use these, they're not flat" and they weren't. They not only bowed along the side, but the corners went up as well. These were a spanish tile which were a little rustic, but this was unacceptable. I called Best Plumbing Supply right away and immediately, that night, went out to see if I could find another tile in stock that I would like better than the one I had. I didn't find one and the tile company acted like I was trying to pull a fast one and said they would call me back the next day. At work the next day I got a somewhat frantic message on my phone "Don't install the tile, don't install the tile". They had had their tile man pull some samples from the stock and lo and behold they agreed with us, the tiles were defective. They wanted to have me find a replacement, but I said it was too late and that I had to install what I had. They did come and pick up the tiles, but wouldn't enter the house, so the contractor's men had to carry all the tile out again.

Plumbing – My plumbing doesn’t work

One slab or two?

Pulls or Knobs?

How much is this all going to cost?

Wires everywhere

Do you really need heat?

The dog ate the directions.