The Beige Beast

Our kitchen renovation is, compared to most, going to be quite mild.  We're not adding an addition, knocking down load-bearing walls, or anything that crazy.  But the big thing that we are doing, is removing the soffit from over the kitchen cabinets. 

The big question is, "What lies behind the Beige Beast?"

It's a ranch style home, so I know we're not going to deal with upstairs bathroom pipes running through the soffits, or HVAC ducts, since all of our ducting is in the basement.

As I'm still working on my x-ray vision, my next best option was to cut holes in the drywall and see what we're in for.

Okay, not so bad here.  Looks like the 2x4 framing for the soffit simply nails to the 2x4 framing of the walls.  But, uh oh, that looks like electrical.

 Camera flash + 50 years of spider webs = inconclusive pictures.

There's one reason the soffit (and therefore the kitchen itself) is so cold.  The cardboard (!!!) they used to hold up the insulation has fallen down into the soffit, letting cold air (or hot, in the summer) to circulate, and allowing the beige beast to breathe.

Awww, poopie.  There's the wires to the right, which come up the wall on one side of the soffit, and go back down the other wall.  Unfortunately, they're going to need to be moved up into the attic, because I'm going to need to drywall right up to that top 2x4 on the header.  That means re-running all of those wires, because I'm going to need to drill holes in the header to route them up into the attic, and then back down.  And to the left... There's what I was most afraid of.  The vent stack for the sink, jutting oh so gracefully out of the wall cavity, into the soffit, and into the attic.  That too will need to be cut, re-routed through the header and into the attic.  Thankfully, of the 3 types of plumbing: getting fresh water to the faucet, getting waste water to the sewer, and getting fresh air to allow the water to drain quickly, this is the latter, and most forgiving.

That's just one corner, and it's the worst.  But there is more electrical running through the rest of the soffit, as well.  The electrical panel, which is full, is in the basement directly below the kitchen.  There's 5 circuits that come up through the wall, and feed every light and outlet in the house.  We can't microwave and use the toaster at the same time, as it trips a breaker, so while we're doing the kitchen, we're going to get a larger panel, too.  That's a lot of electrical to re-run/re-route, but thankfully, as expensive as copper is right now, standard electrical wiring is only 19 cents a foot. 

And finally, no, that is not a dead rodent pulled from the soffit.  It is a kebab skewer that conveniently collected cobwebs, so that my hand didn't have to.

What We're Doing Different

Our kitchen is a pretty basic, U-shaped kitchen.  Standing at the sink, you've got the oven on your far left, dishwasher to your right, and refrigerator on your far right.  We're happy with the size and layout, but as part of the remodeling, we've decided to make some small changes.

Our kitchen is oddly large for the size of our house.  It's roughly 22'x12 1/2', with a 14'x2' section bumped in because of the bathrooms (west wall), and a 9'x3 1/2' bumped in because of the stairway to the basement (south wall).

First, because dishwashers weren't standard in the 1960's, there was a section of drawers removed by the previous owner where the dishwasher is now.  The drawers were turned into half the base for a workbench in the garage.  Because of that, we have 6 upper cabinets with doors, a lower cabinet with carousel, the sink base cabinet, and  a large corner base cabinet... And 1 drawer, in the entire kitchen.  Also, because of the U-shape, the kitchen occasionally lacks counter space for food preparation.  We hope to solve both issues by adding a base cabinet with drawers and countertop, to the left of the oven.

Secondly, there's a section along the basement stairway wall that is just somewhat dead space.  We have a buffet (IKEA Norden, of course!) along the wall now that quadrupled our kitchen drawer storage.  The top works great for holding food when friends are over for potlucks, but open storage on the bottom means that we can't really store anything ugly.  So our plan is to replace the Norden buffet with the same style cabinets as the rest of the kitchen (AKURUM cabinets ÄDEL medium brown), but with frosted glass doors on the upper cabinets, and regular doors on the base cabinets.  Countertop for food serving, base cabinets for hidden storage.

We're not knocking down walls, or building an addition on, or anything like that.  We will be removing the soffit over the existing cabinets, which will probably be the most difficult part of the task.  More on that soon, maybe the next entry.

The Beginning

A little back story is always a good place to start.  This is the kitchen from our 1964 Columbus Ohio ranch house.  This photo was actually from 2006, shortly before my wife Sarah and I bought the house.  The kitchen is in very good condition, it's just... dated.  The entire house was dated, but was in excellent condition.  We bought it from the estate of the original owner, who had recently passed away.  Check out the tile!  Check out the scalloped... thingy over the sink!

We've done a few smaller projects to update parts of the rest of the house; painting, a new fence, the ongoing project of replacing baseboards, etc.

We've also done some important "infrastructure" upgrades, such as getting more than 3" of insulation in the attic, and replacing the single pane aluminum windows, with double-pane Low-E vinyl windows.

We've always been huge fans of IKEA, even though the closest is around 100 miles away, in Cincinnati.  Most of the rest of the furniture in our house is IKEA, so naturally we gravitated towards their kitchen offerings.  When my wife pointed out that IKEA is having a 10%-20% sale on their kitchens, we decided it was time. 

Honestly, this blog will be primarily to document the process for myself, but I hope you will enjoy the process along with me.