Kitchen Remodel

Unfortunately we didn't get real good "before" pictures because we started on this project the first night we moved in. The original kitchen was very closed off from the dining room and hallway with upper and lower cabinets all the way around suspended from a bulkhead. There was a suspended ceiling with 4' fluorescent lights.

We wanted to open the kitchen up more to the dining room, cut out a section of counter so we could walk between the kitchen and dining room easily, move the location of the refrigerator, create a small island for the kids to sit at, and update the cabinets. Someday we'll get around to the floors too.

On the very first night we owned the house, we removed the upper cabinets, which opened up the space a lot.

The next step was the replace the fluorescent lights. Long-term we wanted recessed (can) lights, but we weren't sure about the final layout of the kitchen, so we didn't know exactly where we wanted the recessed lights. So short-term we put in a flexible track light. Unfortunately I didn't get a good picture of the new track light, but it's visible in some shots later on. At this point work stopped for the summer with outside/garage/boat related projects getting the priority until winter.

With the recessed ceiling/fluorescent lights gone, we could remove the bulkheads that the cabinets hung from.

Filling in the patio

The house had a two-tiered concrete patio, with the lower patio sunk about 16" below the surrounding grade. The patios were made by laying out a 3' x 3' grid of treated 4x4's, then pouring in concrete. The upper patio has held up fairly well for 38 years, but the lower (and larger) patio had heaved badly. The original owner of the house told me the lower patio had held up well until they turned it into an ice skating rink one winter. With that much water I'm sure the spring freeze/thaw cycle resulted in a lot of movement that year.

If money were no object we had a number of different ideas to improve this area, but this project needed to be done on a budget. The lowest cost option that fit with the way we wanted to use the yard was simply to remove the lower patio concrete and fill it in with dirt to bring it up the grade with the rest of the yard and the upper patio area.

Before

After

It took 6 yards of sand and 32 yards of dirt to fill the area. My calculations before hand were 34 yards total, so it was close. 30 yards of dirt were delivered by Fra-Dor. We picked up 6 yards of fill sand from Hammes Sand and Gravel, which is the same place we dumped the concrete. I wasn't happy with the grade after putting in the 36 yards of material, so I picked up the final 2 yards of dirt from Patio Town in North St. Paul.

Since we were raising the grade, we also had the raise the window well height. They were galvanized steel originally, and we hoped to just add another 2' section to the top, but the shape of the galvanized window well that we picked up from Menards didn't match the old shape, so I built new window wells out of 2x6 treated wood (reused from a coworkers deck that was torn down) and 4x4 treated posts. The window wells were sized so that the grates I welded up to keep people from falling into the old window wells would still fit the new wood ones.