Kitchen Nightmares: Somerville Edition

When I posted last Monday, I really expected that we would not have tile for a few weeks and that it would be a while before I had pictures of the truly completed kitchen to post.  Then we met with Matt from Payneless Flooring, who had an opening this past Thursday.  He and his crew worked all day Thursday and Friday, and then half the day Saturday, to install our complex tile design.  Now the kitchen is really finished and looking exactly as we envisioned it so many months ago.

Fact is, Anne and I had no idea how difficult our tile would be to install.  It’s handmade tile, all irregular, and it’s thick clay mixed with little stone mosaic tiles which happen to be much thinner than the clay.  There’s the big design above the stove, with all its intricacies, and the field tile/stone layout, which required clipping corners from most of the basic 4×4 field tiles.  I was home on Thursday and got a sense of how much effort they had to put in to make the design look right.

After so many weeks without a kitchen, worrying about how every detail would turn out, it was great that this final bit went so well.  The guys from Payneless did an incredible job, and Matt refused to raise the price despite the job running about a day longer than planned.

Here’s how it all turned out:

Main wall with design above stove

Framed tile design above stove

Desk area

Sink corner

Whole main wall

And that’s it!  That’s how we wanted the kitchen to look.  We’re so happy with the result - tile, cabinetry, counter tops, appliances - everything ended up exactly as we wanted it.  Although… Anne’s not too happy with the paint color on the walls… that might get changed.

We did tile the dry bar too, though because the exact design for the dry bar changed so late in the process, we didn’t have enough tile to cover the whole back of the cabinet.  So it’s a bit incomplete while we wait for the last bit of tile to arrive:

Partially-complete dry bar tile

More of these stone tiles should arrive next week, at which point they’ll be cemented to the wall and grouted.  And then we’ll really be done…

Uncategorized after, design, dry bar, tile

Happy New Year!

The kitchen is really starting to take shape.  We got back from our night in Stowe and found that the wall cabinets in the sink corner had been hung, and almost all the other cabinets are sitting in place (or close to it) in the kitchen.

It looks like George decided to start building from the sink corner, which has a big cabinet piece where the sink will go diagonally.  To the right is a regular cabinet and drawer, and to the left is a small vertical cabinet for storing cutting boards, pizza stones, etc. - flat things that can be stored vertically.  That cabinet provides some standing space between the sink and the dishwasher, which will be just to the left of it.

Above all of that, wall cabinets extend as far as tolerable toward the corner, and a set of shallower shelves take over and extend all the way into the corner itself.  The pendant lamp will hang down in front of the shelves directly above the sink.  We just have to figure out how far down the lamp should hang; we envisioned the shelves as being primarily decorative, so it’ll be ok that the light ends up directly in front of them.  We’ll just work it into whatever we decide to put there.

Wall cabinets and corner sink unit

The large pantry cabinet which was blocking our hallway is also in place in the corner next to the door.  It has three large drawers on the bottom and plenty of space for food on the top.

Pantry cabinet between door and window

Everything’s being built to a 96-inch design height, so the pantry and oven cabinets are each 8 feet tall.  All of the wall cabinets go up to 8 feet off the floor as well.  That should give us a ridiculous amount of storage, which we will proceed to fill within a couple of months.

With crown molding, the upper cabinets will touch the lower ceiling

Other pieces have been moved into place and unwrapped:

The full cooktop/vent hood assembly

Window (cat) seat with cat food and dish drawers

More cabinet work is scheduled to be done tomorrow.  All of our appliances should arrive tomorrow afternoon as well.  They get to live in the dining room while cabinet installation is finished.

This weekend we plan to get our cabinet hardware, faucet, and maybe the pendant lamp.  These are the last visual/functional elements we haven’t decided on and it’s getting to be that time.  Whee!

Uncategorized cabinets, construction, design

Today was the worst kind of day, a weekday with no progress made on the kitchen.  Where were the plumber and electrician?  Walls still open here!

Actually, it’s not true that no progress was made.  Today we made the most difficult decision we’ve ever had to make.  It’s been eating away at us for weeks, a constant buzz interfering with work, sleep, eating habits, even TV watching schedules.  I stopped speaking to Anne for over a week.  She nearly canceled the whole project.  But today it was all resolved: we decided on tile for the backsplash.

There have been a lot of decisions to make on this project, and most of them have gone smoothly.  Anne had a cabinet line picked out before we even started.  We mostly agreed on wood and finish.  The countertop was a difficult balance of style and environmental concerns, but ultimately soapstone was the right choice.  Appliances were done in a couple of hours at Yale Electric’s showroom.  Then we tried to look for tile.

Turns out Anne and I have strikingly different tastes when it comes to kitchen wall coverings.  I like stone, she likes ceramic.  I like relatively modern, somewhat detailed designs and layouts.  She likes simple, hand-painted, classic French-country tile.  I like to play with colors and textures.  She would prefer a clean, consistent look.  After two contentious visits with tile designers, we were both exhausted.

Finally, we found a line of ceramic tiles whose designer mixes her ceramic with various types of stone.  The result is a look that can be multi-textured but consistently-colored.  We chose a color scheme and design for the basic backsplash.  Then we chose accent pieces to create a more decorative element above the cooktop.  It’s not distinctly French country, nor is it modern, but it has elements of both.  And miraculously enough, we both like it.

That’s it - the last major design decision to be made on the project.  We still need to pick a paint color and other little things, but this was the last big one.  Whew!

Uncategorized design, tile