Scope creep, and then some -- new kitchen!

If you recall, I was bemoaning the sorry state of our old house construction. Well, it turns out that to make the living room floor level, they will need to have a stepup from the kitchen to the LR/DR, as they cannot get the floor height of the kitchen to match, without losing so much of the cabinetry that we lose the dishwasher. Keep in mind that we've already "lost" the trash compactor, something that I don't really care about. But the dishwasher I do...

So, we bit the bullet and decided that we will replace the kitchen, so that they can get everything to fit right. We hadn't really planned to do this at this stage, because, well, we don't have any money left. But we have a home equity line o' credit, so we'll have to dip into that to be able to afford it.

Fortunately, the timing was good, as I took this whole week off. And ironically, I had decided to go up to the design center in SF to look at kitchens for when we had the money to do it. So I had a headstart on trying to figure things out -- what started as a speculative exercise turned into a for-real one.

I visited about six kitchen places in two days. Two custom cabinetry makers, and two European kitchen makers have copies of our old kitchen plans and are going to give us a rough bid as to how much new cabinets will cost. I did also look at Bulthaup and Poggenpuhl (which I preferred), but they are going to turn out to be way too expensive for us to do. So right now the choices are between custom cabinetry and Varenna, by Poliform (an Italian company). I should get the bids in a week, and then we can decide.

We weren't planning to replace most of the appliances, however, it turns out that our ovens are 24 inches, which is now a nonstandard size. So we'll get new ovens. We can keep our cooktop, and we'll keep our Subzero refrigerator (saving us quite a bundle). The dishwasher is up for grabs... if we can reface it to match the cabinetry, we'll keep it, because it's still in good working condition. Otherwise, we'll replace it. We'll have to get new sinks and fixtures, as well as new counters. We'll also have to upgrade the light fixtures. As much as I'd like to replace the kitchen windows, we'll probably leave them as they are for now to save money.

Replacing the kitchen now, although a bit stressful financially, will be good in the long run, since we can get all the major construction over with at the same time, and since we'll now have a kitchen that matches the rest of the house. If we can get the kitchen spec'd out and ordered by the end of the year, it shouldn't impact the construction schedule much.

And so, the adventure continues!