Wait a minute, that's not the kitchen!

July 10, 2005

Tearing down the fireplace so that our designer will let us have the basket weave slate tiles on the backsplash over the cooktop,
originally uploaded by Grant13.

It’s probably not possible to confine a remodeling project to a single room. This is particularly true in an open space like ours where the kitchen, breakfast area, and family room essentially combine to make one large room anchored by the stove on one end, and the fireplace on the other.

On a whim, we took the hammer to the brick around the fireplace today and discovered drywall. Shouldn’t be that hard to tear down the rest of the brick and have a new tile surround built. Our four year-old asked us, “are you supposed to be doing that?” as we hammered away. My own guess at his reaction is that he worried about what negative consequences would be visited on Mom and Dad for committing such a willful act of destruction. Maybe he secretly harbored a certain degree of respect for our ability to act out the primal urge for destruction that all preschoolers have but that he, like most, have learned to suppress?

We’re thinking of adding a simple wood mantle, paint on the wall above, and some type of slate surround (and a new gas insert – the firebox is already plumbed for gas). Now Steve, our designer, will let us have the slate basket weave tile design that we want to install over the cook top in the kitchen. Originally he told us that he wouldn’t “be happy with that” unless we had a “reason” for the slate to be there – unless it was balanced by slate somewhere else in the house. Maybe we’ll also add the same pattern to the floor when we re-tile the front entryway (see…just keeps growing).

And because the kitchen window has to go, we have to consider replacing all the windows in the family room. All are black metal and not in the greatest shape. Just won’t fit with the new look. Fortunately, we already replaced the sliding glass door that leads outside from the breakfast area with a slider from Anderson Windows shortly after we moved in. We had a salesperson from Halls Windows in Sacramento (they carry Anderson and Anderson Renewal – Anderson’s line of vinyl/fibrex replacement windows)come out to give us an estimate for everything this weekend. The kitchen window is doable. Now it’s a question of whether we do the others at the same time. We’ll probably replace them sooner rather than later. Now that we’re committed to doing something with the fireplace, we might as well update the windows as well.

[note: decided not to move the wall that separates kitchen from dining room to create more space. It’s probably a structural wall. Even if not, it’d be a big job because that walls rises almost to the peak of the vaulted ceiling.]