The carpenter talk went well. We like this guy, and he can do big jobs or little jobs, which is a good thing. Jane and I have skills, but we have reached that stage in life that makes crawling under cabinets and hefting heavy objects up at awkward angles involving power saws is just not worth the week of recovery afterward, and the risk of medical bills. We have sent off for material samples—color matching anything online via computer monitor can give you nasty surprises. We may do the floor, which involves a Rubik’s cube of furniture moving (the hutch in the kitchen is the elephant we have to waltz with) but we have a do-able vision of what we want and how we’re going to turn a shotgun kitchen into a kitchen with storage for what normally sits out.
The kitchen
by CJ | Jun 21, 2017 | Journal | 22 comments
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The really good news is that under the warped white flooring is sheet linoleum. We can lay floor on that. The floor that’s going down in the kitchen is going to be water-resistant.
My experience with removing sheet linoleum means I’ll second that. (It’s messy. It involved a heat lamp and hand tools. And cleaning adhesive off footgear before going anywhere else. This was in the early to mid-70s, and what replaced it was one of the early “seamless” floors, where the material went down with seams and then got a urethane seal coat.)
The floor itself is flat, right? The only thing that is rippled is the top layer?
Floor adhesives can be weird. I peeled off the old tile linoleum in our kitchen, and found that the concrete floor underneath was flat and in excellent condition. The adhesive had degraded to the point the tiles mostly popped off by wedging a paint scraper under a corner. Where the adhesive was still good almost required a cold chisel.
Yes. We had a flood (either dishwasher or autofill cat dish, I forget) and the white laminate is NOT waterproof. The linoleum is likely in good condition and in areas it isn’t, we’ll skin it with superthin plywood screwed down tight.
Have a care, CJ, some of that older linoleum may contain asbestos. Which would not prevent your laying a new floor on top of it.
We checked that out. It’s not asbestos. Yay!
My guess is this is 1950’s era Congoleum… cream-colored. I know not what horrors of design may lie further from the edge. We can deal with click-lock laminate (they do now make waterproof) but if we can do it with Trafficmaster Allure, which uses adhesive seams and cuts with a carpet knife, I will be very happy. THat stuff goes down fast and behaves itself: cutting special shapes is a snap. It’s not as waterproof as Lifeproof and such, but we have a basement stairs headed down from the kitchen: it’s not as if it’ll have deep water or a lot of water—it just has to tolerate water spills or at very worst, a dishwasher seal accident. And we did, in the bathroom incident, test the durability of the Allure stuff—it was a total flood, and no problems from it.
It sounds as if the project will completely improve the trafficability in your kitchen. I’m glad you are getting someone to do this task for you. Our major DIY project has been to redesign the closet to increase storage and hanging space. Over Memorial Day weekend we got a closet track system on sale at HomeDepot, but it took me almost a month to go through my clothes to determine what to donate to Salvation Army, and what to toss. Once the closet was down to bare walls, Michael and I broke out the level and the drill and set out the kit in a variation that would give me the best extra shelf space. I finished up the installation, and clothing placement yesterday and now have returned the bedroom to a neatness it hasn’t seen since before we started this adventure in self-help.
Getting the kitchen so I can get a skillet out without getting down on my knees with a flashlight, and setting other pans out on the floor in order to take out said skillet—that will be an improvement.
Keep it in the oven?
Done that, too, but there are hazards with non-iron cookware…..
The stove in my apt has one of those storage-space/warming areas. That’s where the cookie sheets, cooling racks, and bread pans live. (The skillet I use lives on top of the stove.)
I hear you about having to stand on your head to get to things. Drawers for pots and pans and spice racks make so much more sense not only in terms of accessibility, but in utilization of space. Also turntables. The cabinets we inherited from our parents never have made all that much sense, really. Now we have intelligently designed hardware for kitchen storage, and about time.
The kitchen in my parents’ retirement house had bins in the cupboards under the range, for the pots and pans, so you could pull them out and get at them more easily. There was supposed to be a turntable cupboard in the corner, but I think that got dropped because of space, when the pocket door went in. (I think I’d have gone with a regular door instead. It would have had the hinge side next to the oven, so not in the way when open, as it normally was.)
I bought a couple of racks at the local DIY store, in my case, Lowe’s. They’re wire racks, about 1/4″ diameter, and have the capability to be adjusted to accommodate frying pans, and the rack above for lids and small saucepans. I also bought a rack for a roll-out trash can, but it seemed to be more trouble than it was worth, so I don’t use it. I might go back to it, since my trash output is small – just the cats and me, and I usually put their litter in separate bags and take it out to the trash can outside. I had a turntable in a corner cabinet when my ex-wife and I bought our first house in Virginia Beach, and I hated it. I felt that any convenience it gave was overridden by the waste of storage space that wasn’t used. Circular shelves would have been better than the turntable, but I didn’t know of a way to get them installed, so we just tolerated it until we sold the house.
Corner-cupboard turntables tend to be 3/4 circles, and all the ones we ever had – we got one as part of the house we moved into, the kitchen where we replaced the linoleum – had two shelves. (The cat spent several days behind that one, when we moved in. But at least we knew where she was.) I think you can get shelves that can be pulled out and then pivot, but I don’t know well how they work.
One suggestion: cupboards under a counter, where they’re accessible from both sides, should have doors on both sides. Then you don’t have to fuss with that back corner; it’s accessible. (Or make that a cupboard accessible only from the one side, where it’s easy. I’ve seen that done, where it held phone books and the like.)
Two things are pretty well paramount for me in the remodel: I want pull-out cutting boards—in a kitchen which consists of a 4′ aisle between two 10′ strips of cabinet, coffeemaker, toaster, sink and dishwasher on one side, microwave, range, and fridge on the other, that extra available flat space for dishes to be filled or items to be chopped is priceless. I also want pullout shelves for the pots and pans so that I don’t have to get down on the floor to get the right size pan. Anything else is gravy. But we ARE devoting the undersink space to a water filter and a booster hot water heater. We’re hoping the tab doesn’t run too high, because we’ll have to start pulling things off the list, but my rolling shelves and chopping boards stay!
I used to pull out a drawer and lay the cutting board on top. It was the one right next to the stove, and I kept knives and stove tools, even the wooden spoons, in it.
The house we moved into when I was in HS had so much more storage space in the kitchen that we had one drawer for knives, one for spoons, and one for “funny shapes” (stuff that didn’t fit elsewhere). The knife drawer was the one right under the board, and it’s why I’m in the habit of leaving the board pushed in.
Most of our cutting boards are small, the size of a hardback book, and they work fine on the countertop for 90% of our cutting needs. For bigger jobs like a turkey, I have 2 larger boards; the largest sits across one side of our 2 basin sink, which is nice if you need to allow juices to run off, better to have them go in the sink than on the floor or counter. The other is a little smaller and has a recess running around the perimeter for that reason.
My problem is having enough countertop. I set my chopping boards on a pull-out because the counter is full of bottles, packets, and bowls, the skillet is on the range, and the total work space is about 20″ x 3.5′, which is not enough. The one thing the glasstop range does is give me a little extra place to put things.
If I need more room for assembling things, like rolling out crust for several pies, we have a small but sturdy folding table I got from Costco. It’s 2’x3.5′, I can put a full dinner on it for people to serve themselves buffet-style, and it folds flat and I can stash it behind our telephone stand.