Oh. My. God.

I got the refrigerator! I don't have a contractor, an architect, or a kitchen yet, but I have a refrigerator coming on Friday. Here's how it came about.

As you know, I'm a little obsessive. I went back to Home Depot and PC Richard in Chelsea today. I looked at (among other things) every 24" refrigerator they had - which is to say pretty much every 24" refrigerator in existence, since there aren't that many. And tried to persuade myself that I could compromise and get a non-trim-panel LG or GE, since the trim-panel ones are 3x  or 4x the price.

I got to the very last row - the narrow aisle behind  the big PC Richard neon sign and the window - and then I saw it!

As Is - Last One - 70% Off

The Liebherr HC1001, list price $2700, on sale for $809. The queen of built-in refrigerators. The one you see in all the high-end cabinet displays. Coming soon to my kitchen!

It's got the full manufacturer's warranty, everything inside is present and perfect, and the salesman even pulled it out for me so I could see the back. The manager didn't want to sell it to me - he thought the price must be a mistake - but in the end he did.

Kitchen design revisited

I was so busy worrying about fitting things in horizontally, I really didn't think about the vertical aspect of my kitchen.

I want my cabinets to run all the way up to the ceiling. For one thing, I love that look - I grew up with it. For another, I need the storage space. (I have to get on a stepstool to reach the third shelf of any cabinet anyway; by the time I'm climbing for 6.5 feet I may as well be climbing for 8.5 feet.) But most importantly, I hate to dust - and the space between the top of the cabinet and the ceiling will always get dusty. I'm not crazy about soffits or dropped ceilings, and in any event my window is so tall that either would look stupid.

So ... the kitchen is 102" high, more or less. The bottom cabinets take up 36". Standard backsplashes are 18" (though apparently it's okay to go down as low as 15"). Regular top cabinets come in 30" and 39" sizes.

Doesn't add up, does it, no matter how much you rearrange those numbers?

But in the "cabinet over refrigerator" and "fan cabinet" categories, there are several smaller height choices: 15", 18", 24". Mix and match and here you go:

Changes from the last layout:

• The top corner cabinet to the right of the window is gone. The standard one didn't really fit, and the helpful people at ikeafans.com talked me through why my clever modification of it wouldn't work.
• The fridge is 24" wide now. It will still be trim-panel, to match the cabinets.
• There's a little more slack between appliances. Sure it would be great to have an extra 9" set of shelves or 12" pullout cabinet near the sink - but it would be even greater to have all of the doors and drawers open without hitting one another. We'll see if I need that much slack, or if something else will fit.
• The sink will actually have drawers under it! A big full-depth one at the bottom, a half-depth one above it (to accomodate the plumbing behind), and a false one, as usual, on top. Thank you again, ikeafans! 
• The microwave will probably still go over the stove. The Ikea Kitchen Planner didn't like my microwave this time, for some reason.

It looks very Euro now, doesn't it? I need to think about my cabinet doors again - whether and how I can make Mission style work in those shapes. Maybe some of the top doors should be salvaged stained glass - like these:

Bath bubbles

I'm leaning toward the mother-of-pearl tile after all - I'll try to photograph it again, for those of you following from home. It's not iridescent; it's just white and swirly and shimmery, like actual pieces of shell - coquilles rather than oysters.Still mulling over what to put with it - gold or silver or wood-like slivers of stained glass. I think I want to be nontraditional and use a medium-dark floor in the bathroom, something in the brown or blue-grey family.

If the Sanijet tub of my dreams won't fit (still waiting to hear back from them on that) I could be happy in a slipper tub too - and they come as narrow as 25". Even with airjets.

And how about this for a light fixture? It's called "Lilypad" by Possini Euro, and there's a wall sconce version too.

 

  Meanwhile, there's another unit for sale in the building that had its first open house today. I like my layout better - though they made some clever choices with theirs. But they have the exact same bathroom, down to stupid pipe-chase next to the toilet, and they managed to make it look good. They didn't change the tile or tub - they just reglazed.

Tile, glorious tile!

There's bad news and there's good news.

First the bad news: L'Esperance got back to me, and unfortunately their handmade field tiles are way out of my range (given that I'm tiling 70-110 sq. ft. of kitchen). The sixteen-or-so dogwood and lily feature tiles won't break my piggie bank, but I need to find a different field tile to go with them.(Click here if you don't know what I'm talking about.) I was afraid this would happen.

Now the good news: There are other hand-glazed tiles out there that might work. I found the Solistone Mission line in my local Home Depot, of all places. They look well-made, neither overly sleek nor falsely antiqued, though I don't know where on that palette I'd want to land. And they're a quarter of the price.

Isn't it odd that "Mission" means two entirely different styles - Mexican on the West Coast and Wright/Stickley on the East?

But wait, there's more! Another of my dearest tile fantasies is handmade Moroccan ceramic tile in funky arabesque shapes. (Cue Robin Leach: "you can't afford it!") But what about handmade Mexican tile, in the same arabesques and dreamy blues? The Muslims conquer Spain, the Spanish conquer Mexico, and globalization avant la lettre brings tiles like these halfway round the world:

(scale: each of the individual tiles in these mosaics is 3 or 4 inches long or wide.)

I've got to have them on my big kitchen wall. (Unless they go in the bathroom ...) I wouldn't mind them on the backsplash, but I want to do something with the L'Esperance dogwoods and daylilies too.

Can I make them all work together? And how? I need a really fantastic tile guy.

Tiles du jour: glass for the bathroom

Let's get the wild idea out of the way first. This is called "gradient tile". It's a mini stained glass mosaic - it comes on backing sheets - and you buy it in "columns" of seven or eight 12x12 sheets (you see one column in the picture - click to make it bigger). You install the sheets vertically in sequence, and the tile shades from dark to light (or from light to dark, if you install them upside down) as your eye travels up the wall. You'd think that sort of thing would involve an expert mosaicist, placing tesserae one by one on the wall, and cost the earth. Ah, the joys of mechanization! It's actually very reasonable, prefab. If my bathroom weren't so small and lumpy already ....



This is fun stuff - glass with wrinkly silver backing - you're seeing a 12x12 square (as you will throughout this post, unless otherwise noted). As a generous accent tile, with white bricks?



Stained glass ripply ovals. Again, probably as an accent with something else, e.g. white stained glass bricks or squares.




Clear and frosted, slightly green:



This is lovely stuff - I have a sample of it - the picture does not do it justice (click to see it bigger). It's a very thin glass tile that really looks like mother-of-pearl.

The refrigerator question

The refrigerator is generating much of my kitchen planning angst.

Where to put it is fairly clear – in front right corner by the door. It has to be on the right wall, because the left is too shallow; it has to be by the door because otherwise it would stick out and block the window.

It’s got to be counter-depth or I’ll lose too much of the closet behind it.

But how big should it be? A full-size counter-depth side-by-side, 35 inches wide? Or something less enormous, like a 24 inch wide compact model?

I use my freezer much more than I use my fridge. I shop for fresh food on my walk home from the subway, and I tend to buy only as much as I plan to cook or eat that day or the next morning. My fridge holds a few lonely containers of yogurt, milk, condiments, and iced tea. My freezer is packed with leftovers, snacks, soup, veggies, rice, boca burgers, etc. etc. Though as my mother points out, you can't entertain guests as a working gal without doing a lot of cooking and prep the day before - the fridge has to be adequate when you need it.

I will never use a water dispenser (cold tap is cold enough for me), and an ice maker is just a waste of space (alone, I never use ice; entertaining, I can just pick up a bag in the liquor store).

I was feeling compelled to put in a full-sized fridge because I’m from suburbia and “real” kitchens have normal fridges; I associate compact with dorm-room. But the plurality of responses to my GardenWeb post asking about layout said “get a smaller fridge already!” or words to that effect.

So I’ve been persuaded to go with a counter-depth, 24" wide fridge (and reclaim twelve more inches of counter space! woohoo!). I've looked at pretty much all of them (there aren't that many), in person or online.

I want it to be tall - I have 8.5 foot ceilings, if I'm going to compromise on width I should get more height. And I want to maximize freezer capacity, because I use the freezer much more than the fridge. Oh, and I'd rather not pay $4000 for it, as I'm not made of money.

Here's my next problem: all ones I like best don't come trim-panel. And it's very important to me to have the fridge disappear into the line of cabinets. I know that you can get a custom trim-panel mounting kit from Frigo - they say they can make them for any appliance - but what if it doesn't have a totally flat front? What if it's a little curvy and bowed, like this LG or this GE? Fitting trim panels to them looks like it would be a lot more involved (though maybe not - anyone know?).

And then I got to wondering - can wood veneer be applied to metal? Wood veneer comes in thin flexible sheets - it's been used on curvy furniture for centuries. Can it be bonded to the door and exposed side of a fridge? Or would it not work for some reason? Or look stupid? It wouldn’t technically match the cabinets, as they’ve got raised moldings etc.; but it might coordinate – especially if I splurged on a Stickley veneer inlay.

Or should I give it up and just pick one of the suboptimal panel-ready models? (Suboptimal because they're either twice as expensive, or have dollhouse-sized freezers.)

,

Decisions and revisions ...

Back to the dishwasher question.

I've lived almost all my life sans dishwasher - except for three wonderful years in law school, when I rented an apartment that had a twenty-year-old 18" dishwasher that had to be primed (I kid you not) by throwing a bucket of water into it every time you turned it on. But it got the dishes clean.

I hate washing dishes. I want a dishwasher of my own again. But which?

As you know if you've been reading this far, it's a size-challenged kitchen. I have two options:

1. An 18" dishwasher next to the sink.

• Pros: it works like a regular American dishwasher (e.g. you don't have to rinse the dishes first because it has an integrated garbage disposal, it actually dries the dishes too), it fits pots and serving bowls.
• Cons: it's a tradeoff between the 18" dishwasher and an 18" set of drawers. With this dishwasher, I'd have only one stack of drawers; without it, I'd have two.

2. A single-drawer dishwasher, ideally under the sink.

• Pros: it saves space (see above). I could have the second set of drawers too. Theoretically I'd get more use out of it, because I'd run it when I had only a few dishes (I live alone).
• Cons: it doesn't give me most of what I want a dishwasher for. You have to rinse things first (by which point you may as well just finish up and wash them), only dishes and glasses fit well (it's the pots I really mind washing), and the dishes don't come out all toasty hot and dry. And (as I discovered when I went to Ikea today and measured), not only will it not fit under a farmhouse sink, it won't even fit well under a regular topmounted 7" deep sink. So I probably couldn't squeeze it into the undersink cabinet after all.

As you can see, I'm leaning hard toward the 18" dishwasher now. How many drawers do I really need?

For that matter (and this is a question I'll post on the ikeafans forum), why can't I put at least one big 24" wide drawer in the bottom of the sink cabinet, under the plumbing? (Especially if my plumber can be clever about routing the pipes.) Or maybe more than one drawer, if I use the ones designed for the 12" deep base cabinets?

The cupboard under the sink is otherwise a useless abyss to me. I don't need all that space for cleaning supplies and the watering can. And one of the compensations of a tiny NYC apartment is that I don't need anyplace to store the trash. I can just hang a plastic bag with handles on a convenient hook while I cook or clean up, and then tie it closed and toddle 50 feet to the trash compactor chute outside my unit, drop it in and be done with it. There's no garbage day to wait for, no rain or snow or dark of night to discourage me from getting the trash out as soon as I make it. (I believe recyclables go in a corner of the compactor closet in this building, and the super collects them and takes them down. Otherwise I'll line them up on the counter, in their twos and threes, until I feel like running them down to the basement.)

The other thing I started to worry about, after my visit to Ikea today, is making the doors clear each other when they open. E.g. will the oven door graze the edge of the cabinet door, and vice versa? I've got stuff squeezed in to the last inch - I have maybe 3" slack on the main wall. Eeek.

On the plus side, I discovered another countertop possibility: Caesarstone "Rosemary". And I love the clever extras in the Ikea system - especially all of those goodies that can hang from metal backsplash bars - ever more the more I see.

The kitchen is coalescing ...

I think I've found pretty much everything.

Here's a very rough mock-up of what the long wall of the kitchen might look like with cabinet doors. I've switched from the farmhouse sink to a conventional sink because it looks like there's not enough clearance under the farmhouse sink to fit the one-drawer F&P dishwasher (alas). Click on the picture to make it bigger.

















Here are my proposed cabinet pulls, for doors and drawers (from James Phillips Decor on eBay):



















Still need to find a suitable fridge pull.

The sink will be white porcelain, because I dislike stainless steel.

[I thought I wanted a touch-anywhere-and-it-goes-on faucet, but I've changed my mind - stay tuned.]

The counters will either be serpentine marble (unlike other marbles, it's impervious to acid) or a nice quiet Caesarstone (like Misty Carrera or Pebble).

And I've written to L'Esperance about the tile (see previous post). The tile colors kind of depend on the countertop, but I'm thinking some combination of blue, goldenrod, and/or claret. Subway field tiles in a herringbone pattern, with dogwoods and daylilies as accent tiles; maybe a diamond of four dogwoods over the stove.

Oh, and I picked appliances. I'm ignoring the marketing rule that you should go all with one brand - I went for features, reviews, and price on each separate piece. So the slide in gas range is an Electrolux, the fridge is Frigidaire, the microwave is GE Profile, and the dishwasher drawer is Fisher & Paykel. Fridge and dishwasher are trim-panel, stove and micro are white (did I mention already that I dislike stainless steel?).

What else do I need, other than an architect and contractor?

Over-the-top tile

Back to the bathroom. When my mother and I went to the A&D Building on Wednesday, we were both overwhelmingly smitten by some marble tile we saw at Artistic Tile. The collection is called "Musee".

This one's called Eden - the first picture is a 12"x12" sample, the second is a 12" wide strip that I tiled together with a paint program on my computer:























This one's called Terme - the first picture is 3"x12", the second is a 12" wide strip I put together (rather crookedly, I'm afraid):






















They both come in other colorways too.

The problem with all these tiles is that they're really overwhelmingly insanely expensive. (Matthew was with me when we asked about the price of something I liked at Mosaic House, another impossible-dream-of-a-store; I'll just say that these are comparable.)

But another concept I picked up at the A&D Building is that you can use just a little bit of a knockout tile creatively, and complement it with much cheaper stuff, like plain matching cream and white marble tiles. One designer pointed out that you can even use large white glass tiles to complement marble - it's more practical in the shower.

The accent tile doesn't have to be the traditional border running around the room at chest level (I can't do that, I've got way too much perimeter for such a tiny bathroom). I might, for example, run a narrow scarf of stunning tile down a strategically chosen wall (even better if it happens to be opposite a mirror ... ) It's not so frightening if I only need eight square feet of it.

Kitchen plan in 3D

Here's a very rough 3D sketch of my kitchen design. The Ikea Kitchen Planner is quirky - I couldn't get all of the wall cabinets to sit at the right height, and I couldn't explain to it that I want only a 15" backsplash so that I can reach things better (I'm 5'0"). For colors and finishes, I used the Ikea defaults. The fridge will really have trim panels, and the stove and microwave will be white, not stainless, if at all possible. (I'm not sold on the microwave-over-the-range idea - I'll have to reach up to use it, and I'm afraid I'll drop hot soup on my head.)


















I've read that you should think about where you'll store things early on in the kitchen-planning process, to make sure you've got the right-shaped cabinets for your stuff. Here's how I'm hoping to use the kitchen (click on the picture to make it bigger). Fortunately, I have several other closets in the apartment as well, including a sort of pantry on the dining balcony.


















Comments? Ideas? Will it work? What do you think?