mother of invention
by sandy mcCall

This is a tale of a 5-year kitchen rehab that may never end…but cut me some slack because I have done a lot of the work myself and I’m still waiting for money to do the rest! The upside is, I still have a few things to write about. When I bought this log cabin, the kitchen was horrible and dark—it had (cheap) dark pine kitchen cabinets, dark brown vinyl flooring, coppertone appliances that included an apartment-size electric stove. There didn’t seem to be a way to add my ivory appliances. Two separate remodeling fellows told me that the cabinet configuration wasn’t right. They said I would have to remove all the cabinets and buy new ones. Boy I hate being told I can’t do something!

I studied the kitchen for some time before coming up with a way to make it work. Then, voilà!…it came to me! Just take the door off the broom closet, enlarge the opening a bit and it would accommodate my side-by-side fridge. Then I could take out the electric stove, move a small floor cabinet over a bit, and put my gas stove in where the fridge used to be. Hmmm…I still had a big empty space, so I went to Lowe’s and bought the only cabinet that would fit in the space; it contained a drawer and a cupboard. I wanted to use this cabinet for trash and recycling, so I took the drawer and hardware out and the cupboard door off, along with all the front framing that held them in. Next I figured I would make some artsy-looking door to cover the opening in the new cabinet–there must be something around the house that would work? As luck would have it, I had an old mirror in a frame that was just the right size to fit the opening and would provide the single door I wanted.

This is where the trouble began…the wheels started turning and it has been five years of changes. I had the bright idea that I could have a nice piece of stained glass cut to fit the mirror frame and it would look beautiful, and it did! I added hinges and a magnet closure to the mirror frame that is now filled with purple, green and grey stained glass. Cost for glass cut to fit–$25.

I also knew I couldn’t match the countertop on the new cabinet with the old ones and didn’t want to anyway because I dreamed that some day I would make handmade tile for the counters. So, a butcher’s block for the new cabinet top . . . that’s it! I priced them at Wood You and found that the cost was too high for me, but while explaining this to the owner and also telling him that I only needed the butcher block top, not the stand, he said, “Wait here, I have an idea”. He comes back with the perfect butcher’s block, okay almost perfect–he tells me the legs (that I didn’t want anyway) had been damaged and there was a small crack in the top of the block. Perfect, I said and he offered to give it to me if I would tell 3 people about his business…so now I am telling you all (surely more than 3 people)–shop at Wood You on Hendersonville Road. Great folks!

So now I have the fridge in the broom closet and it fits perfectly. The gas stove is just right with a hood over it, butcher’s block next to it, with great-looking stained glass door on the trash cabinet. But there’s the cutout space that held the old hood above the old stove–ah, yes, a shelf along the bottom will make the perfect place for the microwave…and so it is!

As I admired the work I was doing, I had an idea that seemed brilliant: I could cut out the centers of all of the kitchen cabinets and after refinishing the wood frames I would have stained glass cut for each one of them. Today I would probably use my wood router to make a lip for the glass in the cabinets myself, but back then I chickened out and hired someone to do it: cost, $200. The glass was cut to fit for $125. I installed it easily with window diamonds and clear silicone caulking (the same stuff you’d use to replace any glass in a window, available at your local hardware store). The finishing touches included metal gecko and twig pulls and funky switch-plate covers from The Natural Home in Asheville. The cabinets are quite beautiful and a couple of friends have done the same in their kitchens.

Finally, when I was moving the appliances and cabinets around, I felt compelled to tear out the vinyl floor and plywood sub flooring–even though I knew it would be sometime before I could refinish the pine floors, it was much better than dark vinyl…yuk!

I mentioned months ago in this column that I had purchased a kiln to make the tiles for the counters, but hadn’t had time to learn how to make tile. Well, lo and behold, a WNC Woman reader/tile maker named Dawn contacted me and has traded with me–handmade tiles for the kiln she needed. Thanks Dawn!  

Of course, the rehab continues: I needed better light over the kitchen sink, so last summer I made lights out of heavy copper wire coiled around white glass shades. Recently, I had an electrician add eyeball lights over the cabinets and counters. I still have to build a shelf over the refrigerator and finish the wineglass holder. One thing leads to another so I will probably “need” a new porcelain sink when the tile is ready. Stay tuned for the ongoing saga of the kitchen rehab in a later month.

I continue to hear kind words about this column and I so much appreciate your feedback, although it is not going just the way I thought it would.  I would love to help you plan YOUR home projects, so please email me and ask your questions . . . without your help, there may come a day when I won’t have enough of my own new home projects to share with you. Please write!

E-mail me at sandy@wnc-woman.com or mail questions and pictures to Sandy McCall, P.O. Box 1332, Mars Hill, NC 28754 and I will share my ideas with you and other readers in a month to follow.