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Recipe For A Remodel: Creativity And Research

Photo by FREDERIC SELLET

A raised breakfast bar was removed to extend the kitchen countertop (where the stools are) and a odd little cabinet by the sink moved to above the newly extended counter to create a visual flow in Amanda Henry’s kitchen remodel.

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By AMANDA HENRY

Tribune correspondent

Published: June 4, 2008

The first time my husband and I bought a house, it was still under construction. The builder let us choose the paint colors and cabinets, hardware and flooring, light fixtures and ceiling fans.

In an ideal world, all remodeling projects would be that easy: Twirl the color wheel, visit a few showrooms and ta-da!

Given the current housing market, most of us will have to find our dream home within - as in, within the walls of our existing house and an ever-shrinking budget. If you're moderately handy and not in a hurry, you might consider serving as your own interior designer and contractor - as we did when remodeling the pre-existing kitchen in our second house.

The 'Before'

When we bought the house, the kitchen was done up in a style I would call Generic Country Hospital, with white cabinets, medium blue laminate countertops and jumbo white appliances. The only color was in the ceramic tile backsplash, with its medley of fruits and vegetables.

My husband, who worships at the temple of clean, ultramodern design, put the "fruit tiles" near the top of his Must Go list. But you can't just walk into a kitchen and start hacking at the backsplash, especially if you haven't unpacked the chisel. So we started with a plan - albeit a very broad and general one.

To save money, the layout of the kitchen would not change. Ditto for the cabinets. Although we flirted with the idea of replacing the doors with something funkier in aluminum and glass, it was a lot cheaper to change the handles instead, trading out the squat little knobs for bold silver bars.

Redoing the floor was never an option, since the hardwoods are continuous throughout the main level of the house. Other than swapping the light bulbs for compact fluorescents, the recessed lighting would also stay the same.

Appliance Yourself

That left two major areas of expense: appliances and countertops. The former were of indeterminate age but appeared to be operational. But the side-by-side refrigerator jutted out into the room by about half a foot, looking more like an ice-making portal to Narnia.

I had always assumed that refrigerators came in two sizes: full and dorm room. A little research revealed that you can also buy a cabinet-depth model, although you will pay slightly more for the privilege of having less storage space. In this case, the extra expense seemed worth it to get rid of the looming iceberg effect.

We opted to change all of the appliances at once, rather than waiting for them to die off one by one. Most stores will knock off 10 percent on multiple appliances, but Sears was offering 20 percent back if you bought four, with an additional 12 percent rebate from the manufacturer.

I'm generally leery of rebate programs, but in this case the deal proved to be legit, and the application process was headache-free. By sticking to the same brand, we also ensured that not only the handles, but also the metals, would match; you would be surprised how much variation there is among stainless steels.

Our fourth appliance was a powerful range hood to replace the over-the-stove microwave-fan combo. This was one of the things we knew we wanted going in, given my husband's asthma, the open floor plan and my fondness for bacon.

Counter Offers

With the snazzy new appliances in place, the blueberry-hued counters looked even more forlorn. This is one of the dangers of remodeling: a domino effect in which every improvement begets the need (or at least the desire) for another.

My husband liked the idea of concrete or stainless steel, but the cost was prohibitive. I favored engineered quartz, which is both indestructible and low-maintenance.

In the end, though, we went with granite. It was cheaper than quartz and comparable in price to many of the solid-surface products (e.g. Corian), but with an unmatched natural beauty. To get the best deals, you have to choose from the most common color palette, but we were willing to risk having the same counters as a hotel bar somewhere.

Thanks to the miracle of eBay, we found an extra-deep, granite composite sink by a top brand for less than half the retail price. EBay was also our source for the crazy-looking faucet coveted by my husband, again at about 50 percent below retail.

I was a little worried about ordering something such as a sink online, but the seller we chose had excellent customer feedback. When the supposedly indestructible sink arrived with a major crack, the store had the UPS guy pick it up the next day and immediately shipped a new one.

Got Your Back?

New counters and appliances made a big difference, but the room still didn't look finished - thanks in large part to the peeling, pockmarked stretches of wall formerly covered by fruit tiles. We knew we wanted to replace them with something in the mosaic glass family, but we waited until the counters were in before deciding on a color.

The online selection was much better than we found locally, but you really need to see something such as tile in person, so we started by ordering boxes of samples. For months, little cardboard-backed swatches were lined up all around the kitchen.

Every visitor was asked to opine. Red or gray? Iridescent or transparent? Mosaic or plain?

One promising finalist slipped behind the cabinets, lost for eternity, or at least until the next remodel. Another was great during the day but completely different under artificial lights. Some were just too bathroom-y. We finally settled on a tiny, translucent mosaic in a color called smoky quartz. The iridescent finish was out of our price range, but the tile company offered a slightly irregular batch at a discount.

Although neither of us had ever worked with tile before, my husband managed to install it without too much difficulty (my job was to keep the baby out of the bucket of grout). The end result is one of my favorite parts of the kitchen, and it only cost a few hundred dollars in materials.

Finishing Touches

A professional designer would undoubtedly have planned the whole look in advance, but we found it most cost-effective to take the design step by step. This also helped cut down on decision fatigue, a dangerous condition in which you are so tired of choosing stuff that your design philosophy becomes "whatever."

The last big choice was one of the cheapest: paint. As the months passed, my husband's fancy turned from apple green to aqua, then back to fluorescent lime before taking a detour into terra cotta and ochre. It was hard to tell which shade would tie everything together and still produce some pop. We settled on a warm "aloe" with hints of gold to jazz up the cool tones of the counters and backsplash. It may give a future realty agent heart palpitations, but it works for us.

There wasn't a lot of space for decorative accessories, so we filled the lone bare wall with a row of photographs my husband took at the Museum of Modern Art. We also bought a new utensil holder, electric kettle and hand-soap dispenser, so that all of the stuff on the counters has the same brushed-nickel finish - maybe another thirty bucks at Target and Ross - and changed the outlet and switch plates for a few dollars apiece.

All in all, we spent nearly a year of intermittent work and approximately $10,000 on the remodel. (It hurts less in small installments and if you bear in mind that a "minor" remodel like ours usually costs at least $15,000, according to Remodeling magazine.)

We were without a sink for about two days while waiting for the new counters to be installed, but otherwise the only inconvenience was looking at torn-up walls for a while - a small price to pay for having a really nice kitchen for the long haul.

TIPS FOR A BUDGET REMODEL

Install the appliances yourself. It's a lot easier than you think and saves hundreds of dollars.

You can sell your old appliances via the classifieds, or donate them to an organization like Habitat for Humanity, which will often pick them up – and leave you with a nice tax deduction.

Many stores will match a competitor's price. It pays to shop around.

Read the small print. If you're getting new countertops, find out what the quoted price includes – demolition of the old counters? A beveled edge? Cut-outs for the sink and faucet? Many places tack on significant extras to the base rate.

When choosing colors, try to see them in your actual space, and in both natural and artificial light. Then live with the swatches for a while to make sure you won't be sick of them after a week.

If you're learning a new skill, like installing tile, start in an out-of-the-way spot so the trial-and-errors will be less apparent later.

Be realistic about your needs. Once you start upgrading, it's easy to go crazy. But how many of us really need an Iron Chef-worthy oven?

Don't forget to think about empty space. Improving sightlines by changing the scale of a counter or an appliance can dramatically open up a room.

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