(upbeat guitar music) - The kitchen when we
moved in was horrible, it had really old cabinets, rust colored walls so it was really dark. - Our last kitchen, I did most of the work myself and it took about a year. - [Ronna] You wouldn't know where to put the stuff next to the
stove because actually, there wasn't even a
counter next to the stove. - I kept saying I'm not ready to do it. - We'd been through it once and knew we could do it again. - One day I came home from my work and my wife is ripping the walls apart. (Ronna giggles) I think she was ready to start. (jazzy horn music) This house is from the 1920's. Outside it's charming. The character and nature of this home from the time period has
a lot of characteristics that I love. I live here with my wife, Ronna, my son, Owen, and my daughter, Emilia. I'm an architect and my
approach as an architect to kitchens is to make it
look original to the house, while still updating the homes to work with more modern lifestyle. The entire layout of
the kitchen was awkward. - The flow was so bad, and a major reason for that was there were four doors
in really bad locations. - [Rob] One door was to the laundry room, one door was to the outside, one door was to the dining room, and another door to the breakfast room. Size was one issue but it was
primarily the circulation. - One huge priority was
adding counter space and making sure it was all connected. - [Rob] So what we did was
move all the doors to one side and move the kitchen to the other side. We knocked down the wall between the utility room and the kitchen, then we moved the interior stairway door to one side too, so all the circulations are one side, people are walking in and out, the kids are walking in and out, and we're working on the
other side of kitchen which is the stove, the
refrigerator, and the sink. (upbeat guitar music) - [Ronna] When we looked
at redesigning the kitchen, one way that we could have
enlarged it was by eating into the space in the breakfast nook but we really liked eating
in that breakfast nook. - [Rob] And we decided
there's a cute little arch, and we have a nice cabinet,
and we'd rather have that rather than tearing down the wall. - We also realized if we kept that wall, and that arch, that
wall would give us space to add this whole giant cabinet, like a china cabinet. The china cabinet was a really great way to give us extra storage. We purposely designed it in such a way that there's glass on the top so you can show pretty things. The lower parts, we designed with drawers that you can't see what's inside, so it's really a great place to put ugly stuff like Tupperware. One area in particular
that I really appreciated was this cabinet right
above the refrigerator to put stuff that we
don't use all that much. (upbeat music) - There's a lot of new elements that you don't have in a 1920's kitchen. One's a dishwasher, there's a microwave, I like to hide the microwave, in our kitchen we put
it in an upper cabinet and it works fine. Our refrigerator, it's a
standard-depth refrigerator, I put a recess in the wall
so we could push it back. It's about a $700 refrigerator, a lot of times we're using
paneled refrigerators which start at about $7,000. The kitchen cabinets are custom. You can see the frame of the cabinet, the doors are inset, so again, it's indicative
of a 1920's cabinet but it functions much better. Now the drawer slides so
it functions very well. (lighthearted guitar music) - [Ronna] One thing we
knew we wanted to do was brighten up the kitchen. We had a color consultant help us, and the trick she told us was the ceiling color is 50% of the wall color. And I think that just
helps with the contrast, with the molding. The other interesting trick
was raising the ceiling. - [Rob] It feels like a bigger room. It allows for bigger windows, it allows for our cabinets to be taller. - [Ronna] We knew we wanted
to put in a much bigger window and a door with glass in it. One way to save money, obviously, was to look at salvage materials. Rob happened to drive
by a neighbor's house around the corner and
noticed they were getting rid of these old windows and turned out they were an exact match. - [Rob] I went and bought an old door and it's a beautiful door,
it has lovely proportions. The sides are 2 and 1/4 inches, the divided lights are 7/8 inch, so it has all these
different characteristics. The stove we got from a friend who actually never used it. He moved into a house and said "I don't want an old stove,
I don't know if it works." They're almost free on Craigslist, in any part of the country right now. - I love the look of it, for sure. It's a little temperamental, but it's the price you
pay, I guess. (chuckles) When you have the stove against a wall, you often don't have a lot
of space on either side, so we have little cabinets on each side that are pretty narrow
and those work great for cookie sheets. And, we also have these
tiny little drawers that are right above those cabinets and I found those fit spices perfectly. Above the stove, we have
this little built-in for our salt and pepper that I think is just a nice detail to have over the stove. - [Rob] The stove, it's critical in keeping the appearance of an old home. So, the hood to me, it's like the stove, so here I wanted to make the
hood integral to the wall, so it's the same material as the wall, but it's also reminiscent of a fireplace. - Even though it has its challenges with collecting stains
and getting nicked easily, we decided to use Carrara marble. - [Rob] It's just reminiscent
of an older time period. - Someone recommended
putting sealer on it, like, ten times, and so
we did that this time, we just really loaded up the sealer. - [Rob] This sink, it's what it would have looked like originally. It's back from the face of the cabinet, it's porcelain, there's a wall faucet. - When we ripped up the linoleum, we were happy to find that the floor underneath was this pretty fir, but we were surprised to
find in this one area, there was the top of a tin
can that someone had used apparently to patch the
floor, which was very strange. But, Rob liked it, he
thought it had character and was sort of unusual, so
we just kinda left it there. - I don't know why I like it, I just like this thing that
was original to the house. It's unusual. - [Ronna] Staying in the character of the house has always
been really important to Rob as an architect. The one thing I didn't
understand, that Rob designed, was this little butler's pantry hallway that connected the kitchen
to the dining room. So, I just kind of said
"Okay, I'll just go with it, "I'll trust you on that one." I really like it, I like the little area where we have a little... It almost looks like a little desk, with the dark wood, I like that a lot. - [Rob] And it has a curved ceiling with a skylight, it's
quite a lovely space. - It's actually one of my
favorite parts of the kitchen now. I think it just adds a lot of charm having this nice arch and having the arch for the pantry area matching the arch that goes to the breakfast
nook, which is original. (lighthearted guitar music)
(dishes clattering) - We're really happy with the kitchen in terms of how it functions, in terms of how it relates
to the other spaces, and it works really well. - We can have Emilia putting away dishes from the dishwasher, Owen on the other side
putting away the silverware, Rob and I cleaning up,
then the dog, of course, is sitting right in the
middle of it all (laughs). - [Rob] A lot of the charm
with older homes is the scale. Once you go to something
bigger, you lose the charm. - [Ronna] We looked at
trying to make it bigger and it didn't seem to really work with the design of the
house, and I don't regret it because our kitchen seems big enough. (lighthearted guitar music)
