Back in Business - Kitchen Renovation Complete

jfm0830

For the last six weeks I've been away from my Eggs because my Kitchen was under renovation. It was a total gut & replace job and I didn't bother trying to keep the Kitchen in operation during this process. That turned out to be a good decision, because work really picked up about 3 weeks ago and I have had many 12-16 hour workdays. Where I work from home I was able to be there to answer questions and make decisions for the workers, but I wouldn't have had time to use the Egg. As of last Friday the work is substantially complete and I moved back into the Kitchen Saturday and Sunday. My first new cook on the Egg will be this Saturday. Why not sooner? Well I've been involved in another Egg related project which was adding lighting to my grill gazebo. I've been working on this in what little free time I've had. The lights arrived yesterday and I will have that done today.

This has been a fun year for me as an architect, first came designing my Grill Gazebo last September for my then new Egg, and now I got to redesign my Kitchen. This has been 27 years coming and is long overdue. Onto the pictures:

Between the new cabinet boxes on the left and 40 boxes of stuff from my original Kitchen, my Living Room was filled to the brim.

The top picture shows what the Kitchen looked like after 15 minutes of work the first day and then at the end of the day.

BEFORE AND AFTER

BEFORE: The original Kitchen "featured" a horrible color scheme with yellow and orange linoleum flooring, dark wood cabinets, greenish-yellow formica countertops and a dark thin brick backsplash. I have been putting blinders on and pretending I didn't see these colors every time I walked into the Kitchen.

AFTER: New cherry cabinets with granite counter top, new 12x12 tile floor with matching 6x6 border and 2x2 tile back splash, new paint scheme, and new LED under counter lighting.

BEFORE: Here is another before picture. While this was going on I was working to add lighting to my grill gazebo, which can be seen if you look carefully on the left side of the Kitchen door opening.

AFTER: After years of the other color scheme the new one is such a pleasure to view. People have commented it is like going into someone else's house.

MORE AFTER SHOTS:

The new granite counter top came with a "free" sink, which is surprisingly high quality. I also got a new electric cooktop which I will talk more about later. I also got some new black Kitchen electrics to go with the new color scheme. I really love the new LED under counter lighting.

I am looking forward to trying out the new electric cooktop. It has a flat cooking surface with no exposed knobs or controls. The 9" burner on the left is called a turbo boil burner. It has 3 times the wattage of the the other 9" burner. It is said to bring a large pot of water to a boil in 2-3 minutes.

One of the smallest things is one of my favorite features. I added extra outlets throughout the Kitchen and used GGFCI outlets that featured a 1/4" tall LED nightlight in the center of the outlet between the two plugs. The night lights are on light sensors and  come on when the lighting is low. I had seen other outlets where one of the plugs was replaced with a built in nightlight, but this night light is in addition to the two outlets. They provide enough light for you to find your way around the Kitchen at night.

The view entering the Kitchen from the Dining Room. The L-Shaped counter on the left existed before. The straight counter on the right wall is new and will serve as my baking area. The red trash can matches the color of the trim (when it is not over exposed as it is in this picture).

The new cabinets of my baking area hold the microwave and my stand mixer. All of my baking ingredents are housed in the cabinets right there. This as opposed to my going to two different closets and a 2 wall cabinets up until now.

All of my spices now have a well organized home. There are some baking goods on the top shelf. There are 4 outlets here and more LED under counter lighting.

My flour buckets and dough doubler pails are in one of the base cabinets. 

A trip to the Container Store provided me with some needed organizational tools. I got rubberized drawer liners, spring loaded drawer dividers, and the spice racks seen several pictures ago

henapple

Sweet.. Great to have you back.

CPARKTX

That was a serious project! Very nice looking. Congrats.

Randy1

Looks fantastic!

Village Idiot

Nice work !

SmokinDAWG82

WOW, looks great Jim! I know you are glad to be back in your kitchen,
and we are all glad to have you back posting again!

Chubbs

Jealous. Looks great. Now hit us with some wokked food already!

Fred19Flintstone

That looks great, Jim.  Get to work and post your delicious results!

MrCookingNurse

Nice man!

canegger

Great job

cazzy

Niiiiice! Alright, come renovate my kitchen next!!!

Griffin

You can see you've been missed by all the responses so far. Glad to have you back. The new kitchen looks great.

SmokeyPitt

The new indoor prep area looks great! 

caliking

Very very very nicely done! I love kitchen pr0n!

caliking

Very very very nicely done! I love kitchen pr0n!

Little Steven

Jim,

Very nice! I think your cooktop is induction. You will love it for the high speed but even better is the ability to hold low temps for sauces/hot tubbing

jfm0830

Thanks with everybody for their kind words! The cooktop is actually a radiant cooktop. It is a Kenmore Elite and is their high end radiant model just below their first induction cooktop. On the Kenmores is they mark the burners on the induction tops with an X symbol for some reason. I was thinking of getting the induction model, but I really didn't didn't feel like investing in new pans at this point in time. Once again thank you and I'm looking forward to getting back in the BGE business.

Little Steven

Man, if I could use the top shelves of my cupboards I would have so much more storage :-S

fishlessman

Little Steven said:

Man, if I could use the top shelves of my cupboards I would have so much more storage :-S

i put the booze on the top shelf
) you would be outta luck

SmokinDAWG82

Little Steven said:

Man, if I could use the top shelves of my cupboards I would have so much more storage :-S

Can you even use the second shelf?

Skiddymarker

Nice, very nice - look forward to your return to egging. Everything is so organized you will not be able to find anything!

shtgunal3

Nice renovation! Something to be proud of.

fishlessman

your lino looks nicer than my blue wall to wall indoor outdoor glued down rug
) one of these decades....
really looks nice

Eggcelsior

SmokinDAWG82 said:

Little Steven said:

Man, if I could use the top shelves of my cupboards I would have so much more storage :-S

Can you even use the second shelf?

Isn't that why he got the Bernie? Once that pup's big enough, LS will be riding it around the kitchen as his "portable foot stool" so he can get to the ice cream in the freezer once the temps finally rise outside. He won't be able to just keep it on the back porch, even in Canada. 

fishlessman

the those outlets with the night light are a great feature, put those in the bathroom remodel and slowly putting them in rooms other than the bedrooms, i hardly turn lights on at all now at night which helps me sleep better

RAC

Very nice! Glad to have you back.

r270ba

@jfm0830 That looks great!  It actually gave me an idea for something that I can do in my kitchen.    I have a small pantry in my kitchen that is pretty worthless.  The big pantry is in the hall that goes into the kitchen.  I would love to put an oven in the useless pantry.

The cabinets where you have your oven built in...whats the depth?

ChokeOnSmoke

Beautiful.  Nicely done.  I'm doing something very similar:!

Redoing everything but the cabinets (I like those).   Everything has been ordered, just waiting now... Tile floor, quartz countertops (which also came with a free "one bowl" stainless sink!), tile matching backsplash.  Funny, very similar colors on everything as yours too.  Now I know what mine is going to look like!

jeroldharter

Great job. Looks so much better. Clean and ergonomic.

jfm0830

Thanks again for looking and for the kind words.

r270ba : they are the same 24" depth as a normal base cabinet

R2Egg2Q

Kitchen looks great Jim! Many happy days ahead for you & the Mrs! My wife got her dream kitchen 3 years ago in a home expansion project and we're still loving it today. I showed her your pic of the LED outlets and now it looks like I'm adding them to my Honey-Do list. #-o