Kitchen

You see this pile of cabinets? We’ve been hoarding them since January of last year (well, most of them anyway), paying to store them off-site until we’re ready to remodel our gross-but-mostly-usable  kitchen. We had grand plans for these babies, to strip the disgusting paint, rust, and goo off of them and repaint them a glorious, gleaming bright white. We even bought a vintage 50s Chambers stove to match the theme, one without a pilot light and with an oven compartment so tiny that I would have had to buy all new tiny baking sheets to fit inside, and which we recently sold to a very stylish barber from Riverside because we just couldn’t reconcile ourselves to the idea of eventually using it on a daily basis. That was a sad day, giving up that gorgeous hunk of porcelain and chrome, but it had to go.

It’s time for this pile of cabinets to go, too. With so many pressing items on our list of shit to do with this house, the kitchen is pretty far from even being considered ready to renovate, and the monthly expense of housing these supplies has really stacked up. We finally came to the conclusion last night that, once we’re ready to gut and remodel, we’ll either find another set of metal cabinets (in better condition, hopefully), or else we’ll buy new from somewhere (this is starting to become my preference, due to the customizability).

With this decision in place, I’m allowed to start fantasizing in earnest about IKEA kitchens, which is my current favorite in the running for new kitchens.

My friend Alice's new kitchen makes me swoon

via flickr

mmm, shiny red! via flickr

via flickr, love the whitewhitewhite

Anna from Door Sixteen's ikea kitchen, which I love

In the meantime, I need to go through the room and decide what I can do to it to make it less depressing. Sigh.

Where do we start?

The problem with having such a long list of things that need to be done (or purchased) is that it’s difficult to know where to start. Well, we KNOW where to start: the basement walls. They’re cracked and bowing, and they need to be addressed first. We’re going to be installing wall anchors to pull the walls straight from the outside, and that’ll probably be done first thing after the ground thaws out and dries out this spring. It’ll be a pretty big, expensive project, although hopefully it’ll be taken care of within a few days’ time.

The problem, then, is figuring out what to tackle first after the walls are completed. Here are a few prospects:

• Tearing up every square millimeter of carpeting in the house and installing hardwood flooring ourselves
• Tearing out and rebuilding the basement bathroom
• Tearing out and replacing the stairs leading down to the basement, and walling-off the stairs and putting a door at the bottom of them so that it’s a separate space that isn’t open to the upstairs
• New couch
• The Kitchen of Doom

I’m going to follow this up with a series of posts filled with ideas that I have for these projects.
Where would you start?

Kitchen Computer

Would it be completely period-incorrect to pander to my nerdy/foodie yearnings by setting up a touchscreen computer in the kitchen? I know it’s pretty high-tech, but we could find creative ways to hide it, and plus LOOKIT HOW COOL IT IS!

I wonder if I could convince Kevin to help me set this up if I promise we can do one for him in the garage, too. Hmm?