Pix are here.
So the kitchen in la casa chica is a galley kitchen with a drop ceiling. This ranch house was built in 1970 and that was the style typical of that era. It opens up on one side to the dining room and the entrance to the garage is on the other side thru the laundry room/pantry. From the dining area you step down to the sunken living room. Appliances are all electric.
Ideally, the desire was to raise the drop ceiling; install a gas line for a gas range; have the cabinets installed professionally and open up the kitchen to the living room, but there were too many mechanical components hidden in that drop ceiling; it was too expensive to move the gas lines; professional installation was pricey and the sunken living was not conducive to merging with the kitchen.
I’m handy yet this would become the biggest project I have completed. I am pleased.
We decided on an IKEA kitchen because they received good reviews from Consumer Reports, even better than some of the well know cabinet brands. And even though I had once said, I am never assembling another piece of furniture; I reluctantly agreed to go this route because so much money was saved in the long run.
My tendency is toward dark woods. Every piece of furniture in this house is dark wood and the floors are light. We decided to buck that trend and picked out a light color wood for the cabinetry and dark wood floors.
Originally decided to stick with the same appliances but I hatched a plan to garner additional counter space by getting rid of the wall oven and getting a range oven instead. The plan worked and a great deal was found on a suite of stainless steel appliances.
So a budget was set. Ordered the cabinets and appliances and waited. In the meantime lots of other excitement occurred including my brother’s @TmarkM PHD graduation documented here.
The cabinets arrived on December 14th: all 752 boxes. Teardown of the old kitchen began on December 18th. It took one day to demolish everything and haul it all to the curb for pick-up. Everything was trashed including the kitchen sink.
It took the entire day to assemble the sink wall of the kitchen on day two. IKEA has a unique wall cabinet hanging system where the cabinets hang on a rack instead of to the wall. This ingenuity made for easy installation.
The bottom cabinets have a unique leg system where you are able to raise the legs to level the cabinets. This also made for easy installation.
The range wall was installed on the third day. The problem with IKEA instructions is that they do not have a written language on them, only cartoons of the assembly process. This made it difficult to determine what order to complete the assembly and installation process. Learned a whole new IKEA language: Adel, Domsjo, Plinth, Akurum, Rationell and Streckett. Gotta love the Swedes.
Assembling and installing the cabinets was the easy part. They say the talking snake is in the details and whoever came up with that saying was not lying. We spend the better part of almost the entire rest of the month messing with the finer details of this kitchen remodel. Granted, now we were only working on weekends to complete the project but there were lots of little things to wrap up. In addition there were two holiday weekends that ate up the remodel time.
Backsplash fitting was no fun. Trim setting up was no fun. Under-cabinet lighting set up was no fun. Floor installation was no fun. Installation of Microwave and vent system was no fun.
What is fun? I love my new deep drawers. I love my soft close drawers and doors. I love my sleek clean lines. I love my adjustable shelves. I love my expanded counter space. I love my giant farmhouse sink.
So now all that remains are minor touch-ups here and there. I finally have my kitchen back and can step back and view a job well done. It’s not my dream kitchen, but dammit, it’s my kitchen.
No professional assistance was used during this kitchen remodel. My rough hands and my aching back prove that fact. My Grampo Saiz would be proud.
Pix are here.
PS: Went way over budget anyway. Discovered one can never really plan for a project this big.
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