fluffy rambles: Bracing for impact

Bracing for impact

November 14, 2022 10:46 PM (a year ago)

My kitchen renovation starts on Wednesday. Thankfully I have plenty of advance warning this time and have started to pack up the stuff in my kitchen; I need to spend a lot more time finishing that up tomorrow, though. I’ve only put a dent in things.

I hope that the end result of this is I’ll finally get rid of a lot of stuff I’m not using actively, or at least figure out a better way of storing the stuff I rarely use.

The new kitchen design is going to be the same basic layout, but there’s a few nice changes that are going to happen. The lower cabinet next to the refrigerator is going to be replaced with a drawer unit, which will be much more useful for me (I’ll probably move my pots and pans in there, and the rarely-used stuff that currently lives in there goes into the sideboard where those were kept). The weird, awkward storage cabinets that flank the stove will become less-weird storage cabinets, with a utility drawer on top (but still a door down below).

Also, I’ll be getting under-cabinet lighting again, which will be nice, and the cabinet person had a great idea of relocating the garbage disposal switch to be behind the sink, instead of on the wall next to it, with the under-cabinet light switch being where the old garbage disposal switch was (and I’ll be installing a smart switch there, of course).

I’m still not sure what to do about a lot of things, though. I definitely want a better setup for my microwave and toaster oven, or maybe just finally splurge and get one of those (very expensive) combination units. And this whole thing might be the excuse I’ve been needing to finally get the coffee setup I actually want¹, and not the one I ended up with. Thankfully, there are a lot of coffee weirdos in Seattle so if I do end up switching setups, it shouldn’t be too hard to find buyers for my old gear. (Unlike with so much other stuff that I just can’t seem to get rid of…)

The biggest disappointment with this is that there wasn’t any way to get more counter space, but hopefully the better storage will free up what countet space I actually have. Unfortunately my kitchen also isn’t big enough to have any sort of movable countertop island or the like, either, which would be a perfectly reasonable suggestion to make if my kitchen were more than 85 square feet big. (Which mine isn’t.)

But there will be so many improvements. The awkward spice cabinet by the stove will turn into much more easily-accessed open shelves. The dry-goods upper cabinet will stop digging the corner of the door into the drywall next to it. The floors won’t be janky, disgusting, slapdash-for-getting-the-house-sellable nonsense (and the vestigial floor vent registers will also finally be gone as well, which will make it a lot easier to keep the cats' eating and pooping areas clean, among other things).

It’ll be annoying to be without a kitchen for a few weeks (for the third time in as many years!), but hopefully it’ll all be worth it in the end.