My New Kitchen

By the end of next month, my new apartment kitchen  should be finished.

We are now midway through the renovation of my new apartment kitchen. A month ago, we put 110 boxes and most of our furniture in storage and moved out. It had been Mr. AM’s apartment before we met and nothing had been done since he moved in as a single guy 23 years ago.

This rendering by our friend Anne E., an exceptionally talented virtual artist and founder of Virtual Room Previews, helped me visualize and refine my concept. The rendering is to scale and complete with exact appliance and faucet choices and close approximations of the new, more modern colors  I wanted to use. It’s amazing and I was able to base my construction drawings on the virtual.

Naturally, the kitchen needed the most work. There were early-eighties-ugly energy-gobbler appliances — a white GE dishwasher and fridge. I wanted to keep the black Modern Maid gas range but it would have looked out of place. Since there was so much to do overall and the apartment needed painting, I decided — as a budget compromise — to paint and re-use the kitchen cabinets and keep the present floor.

Here’s how the kitchen looked. Worst, were the Pepto pink walls my husband and his late decorator chose. They left the existing mauve tile counters with cracked grout as well as the pink and green vintage tile.  I found out about the tile and the backsplash before we started. The tile should have been saved but our contractor  forgot and probably threw it out.

There has been progress. Crazy, no? It’s hard to see but the popcorn texture on the ceiling and soffit over the window in the center have been removed and the ceiling has been replastered. The blob over the center window is the dark gray mortar under the plaster — there was a huge amount of plaster repair. That’s our contractor Yves checking his Blackberry and Steven, his wonderful number two who supervises all the work, standing near him.

The same day, Yves taped up the paint specifications I did for Steven – the whole color scheme for the apartment is there. The bottom two colors are for the kitchen — walls and upper cabinets in the beige (Farrow & Ball’s Stony Ground) and bottom cabinets and island in the cocoa (Farrow & Ball’s Dauphin).

Tony, the stone expert who works with Yves, and who helped me pick the Castle White Canadian marble (here  at the stoneyard) did the countertop templating last Thursday.

The day we picked the slab Tony taped off the counters so I was able to choose how the veining would fall in advance of the fabrication. Tomorrow, we’re going to see what’s new. Over the next weeks we should have some dramatic progress and it will be fun to see how Anne’s virtual and the finished compare in the end.

You also might like to see the 7 Upgrades that Transformed my Kitchen and how My Old New Kitchen looked when it was finished.

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