Small Kitchen Remodel

Planning a Kitchen Where Every Inch Is Spoken For

The kitchens in the older cottages around Olde Carlsbad are usually somewhere between 70 and 120 square feet. Many are galleys with a doorway at each end. Others are an L with a window over the sink and a range squeezed against a wall. They were designed around the appliances of their decade, and a modern kitchen has roughly twice as many things that need a place to go.

A small kitchen remodel is mostly a layout problem. The finishes matter, but a beautiful door that cannot open past the dishwasher is still a bad kitchen.

Start With Clearances, Not Cabinet Styles

The usual guidance for a working aisle is 42 inches, and 48 inches if two people cook at once. Plenty of cottage galleys do not have that, and no amount of wishing will widen the room. What we do instead is look at what opens into the aisle. A standard dishwasher door drops about 24 inches into it. An oven door does the same. A refrigerator door swings wide unless it is a French door model with narrower leaves.

When the aisle is tight, a few choices make a big difference:

• Drawers instead of doors on the base cabinets. You pull a drawer toward you and see everything, instead of kneeling to reach the back of a shelf.
• A counter depth refrigerator. It sits closer to flush with the cabinets and gives back several inches of aisle.
• Appliances that do not face each other. Put the dishwasher and oven on opposite ends rather than directly across from one another.
• Shallow uppers or open shelves on the wall that feels most closed in.

Keep the Sink Where It Is if You Can

Moving a sink across a small kitchen sounds like a minor change. It rarely is. The drain has to slope, the vent has to connect, and in a cottage on a raised floor that means work under the house, or in a slab home it can mean cutting the floor. That money usually buys more if it goes into better cabinets. We draw the first layout with the sink, range and refrigerator where the supply lines already are, and only move them if the room genuinely does not work otherwise.

The Wall Question

A lot of people want to open the kitchen to the living room. In many older homes that wall is structural, carrying the ceiling or roof. It can still come out, but it takes an engineer to size a beam, a permit from the City of Carlsbad, and a framing inspection. We will look at the attic and the framing before we tell you whether it is a reasonable idea for your house and budget.

Storage That Fits a Small Room

Tall pantry pullouts, even at 12 inches wide, hold a surprising amount. Blind corners can take a swing out or a simple lazy susan if the geometry allows. Toe kick drawers use the space under the base cabinets. Full extension, soft close slides on every drawer mean the back third of the cabinet is actually useful, which matters more when there is so little of it.

Order of Work

A typical small remodel runs demolition, rough plumbing and electrical, inspection, drywall, cabinet installation, counter templating, counter installation, tile, fixtures and final inspection. Counters cannot be templated until cabinets are set and level, and cabinet lead times can run several weeks, so we order before demolition to keep the room from sitting empty.

Call (760) 271-4880 and we will come measure your kitchen and talk through what the room can hold.