The Kitchen Blank Slate
Well, since it's never all that fun to have just one remodeling project going on, we've started the kitchen.
<Insert terrifying scream here>
We have some resources from the sale of a rental property and so we are tackeling the biggest project to date. It's absolutely clear that when we're finished, we'll have a wonderful family space and it can really be the start of a great lifestyle change. We just have to get through it in one piece!
We've gone through so many iterations and design choices already. The first big decision is where to put the kitchen. We're fortunate enough to have the space to convert a roughly 21x13 space into a kitchen. It's the "family room" in the original design, but we just use the living room for family gatherings now, so we have pretty much a blank slate.
The first thing we've discovered is that all of the mid-level cabinet makers hide behind the term "engineered wood", making to sound fancy, but it's really particleboard. So the drawer may be solid wood, but the box for the cabinet is basically compressed and glued sawdust. So we are exploring real plywood construction to see if it fits in the budget. Right now, we figure the cabinets are the first and most critical thing to get right, so the search continues.
