My Southern Kitchen

Welcome to y’all visiting from  Melissa’s Beautiful Life Friday at The Inspired Room & Julia’s “Hooked On” Friday party.  Thanks for stopping! Please don’t be shy – your comments make my day. Have a great weekend!

A SOUTHERN KITCHEN – that’s what I wanted.

Since love has me tethered to the North Coast here on the shores of Lake Erie, I have decided to make our Cape Cod “Cottage in the Woods” my southern retreat.

We moved here two years ago this month and have been transforming the house one room at a time as budget will allow. That’s a hard way to go because you know as one room gets a face lift it makes the rest of the house look that much worse.

In April, we completed most of the work on the kitchen. There are still a few tweaks here and there and it can take time finding just the perfect accessories but it’s getting there.

This is “Phase I” of the kitchen remodel. The goal was to take our dated, dysfunctional kitchen and transform it into a classic, timeless, southern kitchen. (Phase II will be to convert the screened porch off the kitchen into a dining room. I’m hoping we can  to do that this winter.)  Here are the before and afters from Phase I.

Before: August 2007
I know. Can you say d-a-t-e-d?  There is no mystery as to why this house sat on the market for almost a year before we came along and snatched her up. . . The kitchen tells you all you need to know about the rest of the house! But I could just see the potential under all that pink and blue wallpaper. ;o)

 After: August 2009
The Major Changes:

1. As soon as I saw the kitchen I knew that the island was positioned incorrectly. It needed to be re-oriented to run the length of the room to open up  the workspace.

2. We had never used the table we put  in the bay window “eat-in” area at the back of the kitchen. I thought it would be the perfect place for a fireplace and a couple of large chairs.

We moved the large picture window into onto the hallway wall (I crave lots of light!)  We repositioned the two small existing windows to make room for the gas fireplace.

Since my days in San Diego I had wanted a fireplace in the kitchen after seeing one at a house that a friend was renting. I knew it would be a good investment – here on the North Coast we fired it up this week on cool August morning (how depressing!) I selected this arched fireplace from Heat & Glo because it reinforced the curved shape I was using as a design element throughout the kitchen.

We all know that the kitchen is THE room in your house where everyone wants to be. It’s the new living room! I wanted to make sure I had room on either side of the fireplace for nice comfy chairs – the perfect place for friends to sit and visit or to relax with a cup of coffee catching up on the morning news.

As you can see in this second photo, there was a lot of wasted space  in the kitchen and I hated having to go around the island to get to the fridge (not in the picture but it was just beyond the right edge of the photo and we kept it there in the remodel.) We fixed all that in the remodel!

I am not a fan of the long, flat kitchen island (they remind me of airport runways) and I don’t like the raised bar with stools either so I designed this raised middle section  as my alternative.   Because you see the entire front of the island when you walk in from the living room the island’s “cubbies” are both decorative and functional and the raised area hides a multitude of messes! ;o)

Another big problem in this kitchen was counter space – every counter was chopped up by either the stove top or the sink. The little bit of counter to the left of the wall oven was where we kept the coffee maker and a few cookbooks and it just wasn’t nearly large enough to be able to use it as a work space.

In the new kitchen we solved this problem. I have 8 feet of uninterrupted counter on the island and I love it! (True story: when my nieces and nephews from Georgia came to visit us, 5-year-old Maddie said of the marble countertop, “Oh, this would be great to lay on naked!)

The contractors asked if I didn’t want to reconsider and have a sink in the island. It was not up for negotiation. I love having this space for prep work:  it’s 2-foot deep x 8-foot long. Making  a salad is easy now that I have room for veggies, cutting board and bowl.  I have a pull-out trash bin right there as well. Part of what makes a well-designed kitchen is knowing what YOU need.

We closed up the entrance into the dining room from the kitchen and made a peek-a-boo window above the sink. I would have liked to have had a bigger window but I wanted space for one set of upper cabinets.

You see that I resisted the stainless steel appliance trend. It always comes down to personal choice and I am not a fan of stainless which has kind of been the “it girl” in kitchen design. Instead, I went with classic white which just seemed to be the best choice to create the feel I wanted in this kitchen. We have a 36″ 5-gas burner, 3-electric oven Aga range, an American Standard wall mount sink, and an LG french door fridge. The range is a showpiece that everyone comments on – I love having three ovens in one tight 36″ package.

Something I knew didn’t need was an under-sink cabinet. Instead, I wanted to skirt that area to bring a bit of softness, color and pattern to break up the cabinets and dish washer. The wall color is HC-3 Greenmont Silk from Benjamin Moore.

Between this area and the workspace I have seven toe-kick storage drawers. Since I’m just 5′2″ it’s hard for me to reach beyond the first shelf of the top cabinets, so I limited the amount of upper cabinets we had and use the drawers and toe kicks for dishes and platters.

Before we remodeled there had been no room for the microwave, so it sat on a shelf  the right on the bay window in the “desk” area. Now it’s in the island along with a shelf lift for my heavy food processor.

When we first moved into the house I had a local builder I work with create a virtual remodel with the ideas I had at the time for the space. He thought I was a bit nuts to reorient the island but he loved the idea of the fireplace in the bay window. Once he completed the computer redesign and played with relocating appliances, he “saw” my vision! His plans gave me a good idea of how to rework the space but I tweaked them along the way and made pencil to paper changes over the past year.

So when we were ready to get moving on things, I asked the talented Layla Palmer of The Lettered Cottage to create a final virtual kitchen for me to show my husband {he couldn’t see my vision}, the contractor and the cabinet makers {the ones the contractor had done earlier did not have the correct colors for cabinets, walls, etc.} Check out the link above to see her virtual design of the space. 

Layla was teriffic to work with. She gave me an option or two of some layouts that I had not thought of but in the end, all the pieces and parts ended up pretty much where they had been on the first virtual design I had done {except we got that sink off the island } You’ll notice changes from her designs to the final result {especially in the island design and butcher block counter top finish} but the virtual designs were so helpful in communicating my overall vision to everyone who was working on the project. It helped make things go much more smoothly because they “got” what I wanted to do! If you have a big project like this, I would sooo recommend having a virtual design done.

We love our new kitchen and look forward to Phase II this winter (finger’s crossed!)

My friend Paula suggested I post my pics on HGTV’s Rate My Space. Want to rate my space? Just click here. Hope you’ll give me 5 stars

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