(upbeat guitar music)
- The kitchen when we moved in was horrible,
it had really old cabinets,
rust colored walls so it was really dark.
- Our last kitchen,
I did most of the work myself
and it took about a year.
- [Ronna] You wouldn't know where to put
the stuff next to the stove because actually,
there wasn't even a counter next to the stove.
- I kept saying I'm not ready to do it.
- We'd been through it once
and knew we could do it again.
- One day I came home from my work
and my wife is ripping the walls apart.
(Ronna giggles)
I think she was ready to start.
(jazzy horn music)
This house is from the 1920's.
Outside it's charming.
The character and nature of this home
from the time period has a lot of characteristics
that I love.
I live here with my wife, Ronna,
my son, Owen, and my daughter, Emilia.
I'm an architect and my approach as an architect
to kitchens is to make it look original to the house,
while still updating the homes
to work with more modern lifestyle.
The entire layout of the kitchen was awkward.
- The flow was so bad,
and a major reason for that was
there were four doors in really bad locations.
- [Rob] One door was to the laundry room,
one door was to the outside,
one door was to the dining room,
and another door to the breakfast room.
Size was one issue but it was primarily the circulation.
- One huge priority was adding counter space
and making sure it was all connected.
- [Rob] So what we did was move all the doors to one side
and move the kitchen to the other side.
We knocked down the wall
between the utility room and the kitchen,
then we moved the interior stairway door
to one side too,
so all the circulations are one side,
people are walking in and out,
the kids are walking in and out,
and we're working on the other side of kitchen
which is the stove, the refrigerator, and the sink.
(upbeat guitar music)
- [Ronna] When we looked at redesigning the kitchen,
one way that we could have enlarged it was by eating
into the space in the breakfast nook
but we really liked eating in that breakfast nook.
- [Rob] And we decided there's a cute little arch,
and we have a nice cabinet, and we'd rather have that
rather than tearing down the wall.
- We also realized if we kept that wall,
and that arch, that wall would give us space
to add this whole giant cabinet,
like a china cabinet.
The china cabinet was a really great way
to give us extra storage.
We purposely designed it in such a way
that there's glass on the top
so you can show pretty things.
The lower parts, we designed with drawers
that you can't see what's inside,
so it's really a great place
to put ugly stuff like Tupperware.
One area in particular that I really appreciated
was this cabinet right above the refrigerator
to put stuff that we don't use all that much.
(upbeat music)
- There's a lot of new elements
that you don't have in a 1920's kitchen.
One's a dishwasher, there's a microwave,
I like to hide the microwave,
in our kitchen we put it in an upper cabinet
and it works fine.
Our refrigerator, it's a standard-depth refrigerator,
I put a recess in the wall so we could push it back.
It's about a $700 refrigerator,
a lot of times we're using paneled refrigerators
which start at about $7,000.
The kitchen cabinets are custom.
You can see the frame of the cabinet,
the doors are inset,
so again, it's indicative of a 1920's cabinet
but it functions much better.
Now the drawer slides so it functions very well.
(lighthearted guitar music)
- [Ronna] One thing we knew we wanted to do
was brighten up the kitchen.
We had a color consultant help us,
and the trick she told us was
the ceiling color is
50% of the wall color.
And I think that just helps with the contrast,
with the molding.
The other interesting trick was raising the ceiling.
- [Rob] It feels like a bigger room.
It allows for bigger windows,
it allows for our cabinets to be taller.
- [Ronna] We knew we wanted to put in a much bigger window
and a door with glass in it.
One way to save money, obviously, was
to look at salvage materials.
Rob happened to drive by a neighbor's house
around the corner and noticed they were getting rid
of these old windows and turned out
they were an exact match.
- [Rob] I went and bought an old door
and it's a beautiful door, it has lovely proportions.
The sides are 2 and 1/4 inches,
the divided lights are 7/8 inch,
so it has all these different characteristics.
The stove we got from a friend
who actually never used it.
He moved into a house and said
"I don't want an old stove, I don't know if it works."
They're almost free on Craigslist,
in any part of the country right now.
- I love the look of it, for sure.
It's a little temperamental,
but it's the price you pay, I guess. (chuckles)
When you have the stove against a wall,
you often don't have a lot of space on either side,
so we have little cabinets on each side
that are pretty narrow and those work great
for cookie sheets.
And, we also have these tiny little drawers
that are right above those cabinets
and I found those fit spices perfectly.
Above the stove, we have this little built-in
for our salt and pepper that I think is
just a nice detail to have over the stove.
- [Rob] The stove, it's critical
in keeping the appearance of an old home.
So, the hood to me, it's like the stove,
so here I wanted to make the hood integral to the wall,
so it's the same material as the wall,
but it's also reminiscent of a fireplace.
- Even though it has its challenges
with collecting stains and getting nicked easily,
we decided to use Carrara marble.
- [Rob] It's just reminiscent of an older time period.
- Someone recommended putting sealer on it,
like, ten times, and so we did that this time,
we just really loaded up the sealer.
- [Rob] This sink, it's what
it would have looked like originally.
It's back from the face of the cabinet,
it's porcelain, there's a wall faucet.
- When we ripped up the linoleum,
we were happy to find that the floor
underneath was this pretty fir,
but we were surprised to find in this one area,
there was the top of a tin can that someone had used
apparently to patch the floor, which was very strange.
But, Rob liked it, he thought it had character
and was sort of unusual, so we just kinda left it there.
- I don't know why I like it,
I just like this thing that was original to the house.
It's unusual.
- [Ronna] Staying in the character
of the house has always been really important
to Rob as an architect.
The one thing I didn't understand, that Rob designed,
was this little butler's pantry hallway
that connected the kitchen to the dining room.
So, I just kind of said "Okay, I'll just go with it,
"I'll trust you on that one."
I really like it, I like the little area
where we have a little...
It almost looks like a little desk,
with the dark wood, I like that a lot.
- [Rob] And it has a curved ceiling
with a skylight, it's quite a lovely space.
- It's actually one of my favorite parts of the kitchen now.
I think it just adds a lot of charm
having this nice arch and having the arch
for the pantry area matching the arch
that goes to the breakfast nook, which is original.
(lighthearted guitar music) (dishes clattering)
- We're really happy with the kitchen
in terms of how it functions,
in terms of how it relates to the other spaces,
and it works really well.
- We can have Emilia putting away dishes
from the dishwasher,
Owen on the other side putting away the silverware,
Rob and I cleaning up, then the dog, of course, is
sitting right in the middle of it all (laughs).
- [Rob] A lot of the charm with older homes is the scale.
Once you go to something bigger, you lose the charm.
- [Ronna] We looked at trying to make it bigger
and it didn't seem to really work
with the design of the house, and I don't regret it
because our kitchen seems big enough.
(lighthearted guitar music)