Designing the Kitchen Floor Plan

First thing's first, a floor plan needed to be figured out.

Ikea's website has a really awesome kitchen designer app that anyone should be able to operate with a little effort.  Being the type of home owners we are, we like to do as much of every project ourselves. Mainly this is because we are cheap and like to save money wherever we can.

Hey!  Home improvement in expensive!

Anyway, with Ikea's kitchen app, I plugged in all the measurements of the room and worked with it for several weeks.  I think I came up with about 500 different floor plans.

Here is the final floor plan:

This is our current bad floor plan:

I highly recommend playing with Ikea's home design planner if you are toying with the idea of remodeling your kitchen.  I really enjoyed using it.   The app gives you lots of awesome 3D images that you can pan around of your ideas too, like this one:

Dealing With Our Bad Kitchen Floorplan

Our kitchen has the most awkward layout in history.  There is almost no counter space on either side of the stove, the washer and dryer jut out into the MIDDLE of the room, the available counter space is about 6 square feet, and there are TWO dining rooms in this house.  What??

When I first saw our house I knew that the dinette area could lend itself to being part of the entire kitchen.

Recently I went to Lowes and used their free kitchen designers to see what suggestions they had and if they could suggest a better floor plan.

Overall I was not impressed with Lowes design plans for us or the $8,000+ cabinets they tried to sell me.

The one really good suggestion I took away from Lowes was to stack our washer and dryer.  We have newer model LG machines and they are stackable so we wouldn't need to buy new ones, and they would free up a large chunk of space.

I ran with this idea and talked to Brian about the potential of moving the plumbing for the machines a few feet.  I knew this would be major work because our house is on a slab so cement cutting would be involved.

Also, our water heater is in the kitchen along side the pantry.  I was inspired by an Ikea kitchen display I had seen that had an entire wall of cabinets.  I realized we could turn a wall in our kitchen into all cabinets storing the washer and dryer, refrigerator, and a pantry.  This would also require the big task of moving the water heater.  We hated the idea of the water heater being indoors with us anyway.

We had a plan!

Brian was on board with the ideas.  Even though it was going to be a lot of extra work, we both knew it would pay off in the end.

It took us more than five years now to come up with a practical and well improved kitchen floor plan. I couldn't have been any more excited that something finally made sense!

To finalize and make a more accurate visiual of our plans I started playing with Ikea's home designer.  Check out my blog on that here.

Let's start this train up again!

So obviously I didn't keep up this blog.  We have done so much to this home of ours it has been hard to keep up!  We've added a baby to our lives, and just remodeled sooo much!

FINALLY the time has come that we going to remodel our hideous, useless kitchen.  It's been a long time coming and very difficult to work with the bad floor plan.  But, we believe we have come up with an awesome layout and have pulled the trigger.

Take the kitchen journey with us and I'll try to keep up to date.  

I'll try to back blog all the old projects we've done now that I have a little more free time on my hands.

Thanks for reading!

Starting the Bathroom Remodel

We decided to tackle our larger bathroom that was in serious need of an update.  It had gross white tile and ancient sliding shower doors in the tub.  The counter and floors were cute, for the 50's, but it's time for a change!  Plus, I HATE that toilet!  It is the kind where the seat is not even a complete circle.  It had a gap like a public one.   Here it is before:

Searching around the internet I found this image as my favorite as inspiration:

We were expecting to see crazy amounts of mold and water damage in the shower area.  The tiles in the shower were broken and cracked in lots of areas and the faucet had been leaking into the wall.  There definitely was some mold but way less than we expected.  We of course were as careful as possible removing it all.  The only thing we plan on keeping is the tub, and that's not a promise either.  Here it is in the first demo stage:

To see the finished project click here.

Slider Installed

February 28th our slider was installed.  American Vision Windows is who we used and they did a great job.  It took them less than two hours and it looks amazing!  Poor Buffy can't sunbathe anymore now that it is so well insulated.  ;)

To see what we were dealing with before go here.

Bye bye old door

The workers sealing up the door trim

View from outside all done!

Ordering a New Slider

Today the measurement guy came for American Vision Windows.  A few days ago we got a quote for a new sliding glass door from them, and decided the price was right!  Our current slider is the original that came with the home.  The gap between the sliding side of the door, and the stationary section is so large, I could easily fit a popsicle stick right through it, top to bottom.  Talk about poor insulation!  The door is also so large that the temperature difference in this room is very great in comparison to other rooms in the house.  The sun also shines on that end of the house so it gets heat all day long.  It's totally Buffy's favorite place to sun bathe.  I'm sure she won't be happy with the new insulated Anlin, French Style Rail, Argon filled, vinyl slider.  I know everyone's going to miss our screen door!

Here are a few pictures of the slider from when we first bought the house:

This is the style of what we have ordered. Ours will be just one slider instead of this double door set up:

Digging in the First Days of Home Ownership

When we first purchased the house, we knew a lot of work had to be done.  Who was going to do it?  US! Immediately we dug in with scraping the majority of the ceilings, removing bad carpet, taking down ugly mirrors, and horrible window treatments.  

First things for the trash man were the ugly heater cabinet doors and bad screen door.

The Middle Bedroom

The Master Bedroom

The Smallest bedroom had disgusing carpet so we just scrapped the ceilings right onto it and rolled it on out when we finished.

The Hallway

Got put the best friends to work!

The Living Room