Well, I guess I will bore you guys with some of the details....
Did a complete kitchen redo.
sold the house a year later...careful
Yeah, always a possibility. But it's a risk we're willing to take.
Around here buyers expect houses of our vintage to be upgraded. So we'd at least get some percentage of the money back if we had to sell soon. Obviously not all of it, maybe not even half of it, but we've been here long enough that we'd still be ahead overall.
We did ours a few months back - NEVER again!
It was my Wife's project.To me,a kitchen is functional - as
long as things work,I'm good with it.
In our case the kitchen is pretty dysfunctional as it sits. So I'm all in favor of the project. In fact, I'm doing more and more of the cooking and find myself seething in anger at our miserable junk kitchen every time.
...Of all the things I resisted in the master bathroom project, 2 turns out to be wonderful. A heated floor... where you get up in the middle of the night and your bare feet hit that warm floor. Love it....
Different strokes for different folks (and different climates, different architecture, etc). I did resist. And I'm glad I did.
Our master bath is upstairs, not on a concrete slab. In Sunny SoCal the floor never gets particularly cold, not unless it's tiled. I wanted a floor that's warm and soft under foot. So I was looking at cork, linoleum and vinyl. Ended up with vinyl, not because it's cheaper (it isn't necessarily), but because it's super durable, and the current crop of high-end vinyls actually look great.
I love our tile guys. They did a great job in the shower. And they tried to talk me into a heated tile floor but I shut them down instantly. My energy bills are high enough already. Why pay extra to heat a tile floor that's always going to be hard when I wanted a soft floor in the first place?
You guys are making me feel guilty - guess I need to re-do the kitchen now ...
View attachment 47586
Love it! wouldn't change a thing!
I really enjoy watching chef Staib on
A Taste of History.
Good luck with the project! FWIW, we redid our kitchen using Ikea cabinets. The hardwood floor was done by a professional, the plumbing runs (moved the sink) by a plumber, and I did the plaster, paint and cabinet install. The Ikea system is really neat - but factor in a good bit of time to learn it (at least for a slow guy like me). Once I understood the system, along with a good torque-limiting cordless drill, it goes pretty quickly. Everything is put together in the same manner. Everything is referenced via two rails; one on the walls for the wall cabinets and one above the baseboard for the floor cabinets. I took some time to get these rails "perfect", and the rest went easily.
A side note, I have a Festool compact (CSX) cordless drill. I absolutely love it, even though the price is quite dear. Lightweight, great torque limiting capability, good speed control on the trigger, right angle drive, etc. I'm not saying it is the best, just that it works really well - and was a godsend in assembling 30-odd Ikea cabinets, plus doors and hardware!
IKEA does make nice kitchen "kits," as long as your kitchen is made of rectangles of normal sizes. Unfortunately, ours isn't.
Our kitchen has oddball shapes (multiple 45deg angles) and dimensions. So we can either go with stock cabinets with lots of filler panels and wasted space (what the builder did) or bite the bullet and spring for custom cabinets.
At least our kitchen is annoyingly small. So while remodeling in the existing footprint won't completely alleviate my anger issues, it won't cost as much as if I had to spring for a quarter mile of cabinets and an acre of counter top. Remodeling in the existing footprint also means we won't have to relocate any plumbing or electrical.
The small size helps keep the costs down everywhere. As much as I'd love a huge commercial style range, it just won't fit in our space. We can't even have a junior sized commercial style range. They put out so much heat we'd need a vent hood much stronger than a combo microwave/vent unit. But if we ditch the combo nuke/vent, we'd have to either give up counter space or cabinet space for the nuke, both of which are in precious short supply. So we end up saving $$ and space by sticking with a standard size (smallish) cooktop and the combo nuke/vent.
You don't need to sell me on Festool. I love their stuff. I believe it's totally worth the investment. I'm just having to stretch that investment over a really long time frame. I'm itching to pick up a track saw but can't decide whether to get a new HK 55 or the classic TS 55. (Allocating the budget will probably take longer than making the decision, anyway.)
I'm still using my ancient 9.6v Makita. The darn thing just keeps working.
Hey Guest!
Hey - did you know if you click on the title of a thread it will take you to the first unread post since you last visited that thread?
but were afraid to ask: 
STOP!! Never post your email address in open forums. Bots can "harvest" your email! If you must share your email use a Private Message or use the 
smilie in place of the real @
Pretty Please - add it to our Events forum(s) and add to the calendar! >> 
