This renovation was featured on September 1, 2006
The kitchen has become the renovation of choice when updating a home, not only because we spend most of our time in it, but a properly designed kitchen will also pay back your investment when selling your home. In recent years, kitchens have started being seen as much more than just a room with cabinets and appliances for preparing food; designer kitchens are treated as spaces for gathering, with cabinets that integrate into your home like furniture (Europeans have been calling kitchen cabinets "furniture" for years), appliances that become a part of the design, and overall beauty so great that you no longer need to hide kitchens in their own rooms.
Since a kitchen renovation is probably one of the biggest and most detailed investments for a homeowner, it is advised to work with a professional to plan and oversee the whole renovation. In this month's home renovation feature, besides looking at the "before" and "after" changes of a kitchen, we will also take a closer look at the renovation process, from planning to designing to completion.
Existing plan of the kitchen
Kitchen Before
This 500-square-foot kitchen and dinette space was added to the home in 1986 as a part of a larger addition project. The architect of this home had partitioned the kitchen space into two separate areas, one for cooking and the other as a dinette, as was commonly done at the time. At the beginning, the owners thought that it made sense to have their kitchen partitioned, since the overall space is quite large.
Unfortunately, the homeowners did not enjoy their new kitchen, as they needed to walk around the partitioned wall every time they wanted to take food to the dinette area. The kitchen was also modernist in style and rather artificial in materiality, two dislikes of the client.
