Mark Mitten  0:00  
If you're inexperienced kitchen designer, getting rid of the functional parts of your kitchen and putting in a bunch of narrow less than useful cabinets,

you better go for it

Paul McAlary  0:32  
James,

James  0:33  
can you hear me? Yep. Can you hear me?

Paul McAlary  0:35  
Yep, I can hear you. Welcome the better call, Paul. So I'm looking at your plans and everything else. I guess the one thing I question I have is, your four plan is, is missing a wall along with a refrigerator is now that whole wall is getting taken out? I guess.

James  0:52  
Correct? Yeah. So on the wall, it's a family room.

Paul McAlary  0:56  
So you're opening us up to the family room? Right? And then does the doorway that's at the bottom of my screen. That's next to where the your new refrigerator was going down there that going into your dining room?

Speaker 2  1:14  
That goes into the dining room? That's correct. So essentially,

Paul McAlary  1:17  
what you're doing is you're giving up having a eat in kitchen. Really, you're having you'll have seating at the island, but you won't have a table?

James  1:30  
That's correct. Yeah, that's, that's the thought.

Paul McAlary  1:32  
I mean, the only thing I'd say about that is, that's a big concession. What I always say is, if you go to a restaurant, and you know, sitting at an island is like sitting at a bar. So if you go to a restaurant, with your family, and somebody says that you say, Oh, well, we don't have reservation, can we get a table, and they say no, but you know, you'd have to wait 45 minutes for their half an hour for the table. But you can sit at the bar and have dinner, most people will wait a half an hour to sit at the table. If you're thinking that everybody's going to eat at the island, that's probably not what normally happens. Because you can't really all face each other at the island. So you'll have breakfast or lunch there. But then if you're going into the dining room, every time you want to have a meal together, that's undesirable for a lot of people that you can't, we call it communication, you have no communication between the kitchen, and the table that the people are eating at. So, you know, if I'm taking out walls, I might redesign this space, and take out the wall between your dining room in your kitchen, so that you have more of an open concept thing. And then at that point, at least you'll be able to talk to so Honey, would you like some milk or whatever. If people are sitting in the other room, you can ask them a question when they're sitting at the table. Yeah, that's a big, that's just a big concession that people don't think about. So and I think it also, you don't realize it, but it maybe hurts the value of your home. Just because people want to be able to sit, you know, don't want to go into a different room. That way, they can't talk to the people that are sitting at a table. So just something to think about.

James  3:16  
And that's great.

Paul McAlary  3:18  
The other thing is, it's all the same money, right? Whatever money you're spending on this project, you can spend it a whole lot of different ways. And look at your pictures where your table is now. Is that just very tall windows that go floor to ceiling or is that what is that that is a massive window. So that's a massive window. So yeah, the other thing that you have going on too is that's a massive window. What's the outside of your house made out of? Is it stucco brick, is it

James  3:53  
for lighting though it's brick.

Paul McAlary  3:55  
So when that window is it's brick everywhere. Once you're doing all this work and spending all this money, that whole window area in since it's not a doorway that goes outside, I mean, if it was me, if it went anywhere that was good, I would make it a doorway before I would ever leave it as a window because its whole purpose is to what I had to have all this light around the table only it's really too low for that either. It makes you feel naked almost you can't go sit at your table because the window goes down so low. Whoever designed the house, made it a really big window to get a lot of light in it. But then, you know now you've got plantation shutters on this whole thing because you maybe you feel a little exposed because it goes down so low. So either I would make it a doorway or if you got rid of the bottom of the window and made it closed in on the bottom you'd have to brick it up. You know you could have wainscotting on the outside of your house like panels, wood panels or whatever and on the bottom and then Windows above. And that's a cheaper way to do it. But if you made those windows, then you could have countertop and cabinetry come down that wall. Because right now it's just dead space that's not doing anything. Right. And if you change those windows and bricked up the thing, the cost of the windows, I don't know what the condition is of the windows right now. But you know, you might be replacing them if they needed replacing heaven forbid you did that because now the windows will be much less expensive possibly, but say yet, you were just throwing away good windows and you had to get new windows and do brick work, I would think that the new windows that you're going to get if you got decent windows or Pella windows Andersen windows, something like that, and you bought the windows, probably we have under $1,000 in cost of the windows. And then the cost of the brick work might be a couple of $1,000. But unless you decided to do with a cheaper way and you know, do like paneling or whatever below, but so that's 1000, that might be $3,000. And you haven't picked that cabinet yet. But if you've gotten prices for cabinets, you can spend $3,000, just by changing the color of your cabinets, it's all the same money. So that's really what we're always trying to gotten that we're hitting. And also $3,000. If we take out the wall between your dining room and your kitchen, that might be an another two or $3,000 in work to take out that wall. But also then now you might end up with, not with all these pantry cabinets. That depends on the cabinet brand you're thinking about getting. But all of those pantry cabinets that are down at the end with a refrigerator is are incredibly expensive.

Speaker 2  6:42  
The only worry that goes out in the kitchen has no pantry.

Paul McAlary  6:47  
If you took that out, once that wall is gone, you Yeah, you'd either have no pantry or if you're doing brick work or whatever, they can also close in a little more of the window and then you know probably your refrigerator goes better. If we're only going to have one thing closed in. You could have your refrigerator in this design as it is to you have some other problems too. Like right, that's a tool of an cabinet. Is that what that is? That? Yeah. So you really have no functioning countertop in your kitchen when you're cooking right? You have this big island that has nothing in it that you work at. So the area that normally you work at when you're cooking is on either side of your cooktop. And in this kitchen the way you have it designed now one side is 12 inches, which is useless. It's just wide enough so that the pots can turn out. And then on the other side if you start trying to work there, that's only 24 inches and if you were standing there you would be backing up into somebody at the sink. So getting rid of your oven cabinet at that location is sort of a necessity to your oven needs to move or you need to sacrifice and not get or if you've got to have a second oven or double ovens is the double ovens. Is that what it is? Yeah. So you make your cooktop arrange and then that gets you one oven. And then you put the second oven that you're going to have go someplace else. If you kept the wall you maybe put it over by the refrigerator if you're moving that refrigerator, it could go also underneath the countertop in the island. It could be a speed oven like an a microwave and a convection oven combined. And if you put it in the island that would be where your second oven would go. And then you know now you have a reason to be at the island. Right now the island has nothing in it that you need when you're cooking right? It's it doesn't have a sink in it for cutting and chopping it doesn't have so it did put like a second oven there. You could be making something and then put it in that oven or it gives people a reason to be working at the island and then it gives you enough room. If once you get rid of your double oven cabinet it gives you enough room to slide your cooktop or your range now down so that you can have maybe 18 inches on one side and then five feet on the other side that you can work at and then you'll have this big five foot for longer countertop. So you got to now Yeah little four and a half maybe feet of countertop that you can work at and that's really the countertop where you'll spend a lot of your time because you know that what you do is you work between the sink generally and the stove a lot of the time. So right now your work at that little bit of countertop you have now between your sink and your stove. What are you just working on now?

Speaker 2  9:52  
We work I would say mostly on like the peninsula, but that little corner top like a little corner In between the stove and the sink gets very full. And we work there.

Paul McAlary  10:06  
So yeah, so you're losing that good Peninsula. That's a good workspace because it's it's uninterrupted. So you're keeping the bad part of your kitchen and getting rid of the functional part of your kitchen, right? So, you know, that's why it's better if the oven doesn't go there, and you move everything down. So your island will sit five, with two people on each end facing in, and then three people on the back. Correct. So yeah, so I mean, it's not horrible, because at least you got two people on each end facing each other. But it's not really as communal as you might think, you know, you're not sitting on four sides. But it's not that bad. There's even other ways to do it. You could get rid of the whole second set of cabinets, and then have a countertop coming off the back of the cabinets coming a little bit farther. If your refrigerator was moving, and you weren't gonna have such deep cabinets on your dining room wall. You could have the thing be a little longer. So you had two people on all three sides. Yeah, but the biggest problem, I think, is that your oven cabinet, really? You shouldn't be having the oven there.

Speaker 2  11:22  
Yeah, that's a move it to arrange, and then my will to arrange and then you just do one oven, which will be fine. Yeah.

Paul McAlary  11:33  
And then you can have a second. Yeah. And if you want a second oven, you can put a second oven in the island. You have a microwave in the island now, right?

James  11:41  
Yeah, that's good. Yeah. So you

Paul McAlary  11:43  
have a microwave drawer. So the microwave drawer is going to cost your third $1,200. So instead of making it a microwave drawer, you can make it a microwave convection oven. And it can be for like, instead of spending $1,200 on the thing, you can spend $2,200 on it. And then it can be a microwave, a convection oven and an air fryer. And then you can use that as a warming oven. You can use it as an oven, you can use it as a microwave. It's $1,000 more for the appliance. But it's all those things. Yeah, it's very rare that you're going to need the microwave at the same time that you're used cooking something in the second oven. Yeah, I don't know how far the living room when you take out all those walls, if you don't put the other room in it is sort of a lot of times don't realize what a problems you might have created in your living room. Right? So I can't I can't see your living room. But right now there might be a couch on that wall. Right? Yeah,

Speaker 2  12:46  
exactly. So the other side of that wall, like on the sink side, that makes sense. There's a fireplace, pretty close to right there in this drawing. And actually, the house was built in the 70s. And so it's off center, very long fireplace so that this counter would but almost all the way up to that fireplace.

Paul McAlary  13:08  
Yeah, so I think also, the designers that work for me, I'm not lazy. But sometimes the designers that work for me are lazy. And so you, I think you want to have them put the whole living room into the design too. So you can just sit you I want to have my living room and the end, figure out how my furniture is gonna go in my living room, just to make sure that the overall plan is that you don't want to take out a whole wall and all of a sudden be confronted with anything that you hadn't really thought of, or really didn't get a good grasp of. And you really want to see that thing in three dimensions. So when we're doing it, we're always once were taken out a wall, we're showing the other room. But to me, I'm decorating that room I'm putting where I'm putting when my TV's going when my things are going so that I know how many people are going to sit in my living room now what the orientation is going to be and I'm making sure that I'm happy with what I've created. This is just is really as it is now is a design just to sell your cabinets. It's not really designed. It's just here's here's all the cabinets I put into picture. And here's your bill, right.

Speaker 2  14:22  
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And that's, I guess, we've thought through that. I would say marginally. I say that. The only place when you rip out this wall the only place you would put a TV which my wife and I don't have a TV but resale value I feel like you need a spot for it. The only place you would put it TV Repair wall out would be on the fireplace. Which is part of the reason why when we did this island design, we benches facing the sink, if that makes sense.

Paul McAlary  14:56  
Not a lot of times people have to put the TV over the fireplace Yeah, that's not a crisis, but it's good to sort of see it, you know, especially for resale value. Right. So there's a lot of resale value issues that are involved in this design that really aren't sort of being addressed. I think. Is this a kitchen place that did this? Or it is a home center? Is it a, like a Lowe's or Home Depot?

Speaker 2  15:24  
Drawing that you have is a kitchen design place? Yeah. They're

Paul McAlary  15:28  
not very good. I'm looking at their drawing. And they are your ceilings. Eight feet high. Yeah. So. So you're eight feet high, and they have the cabinet's going up to the ceiling. You can't do that, right. Anybody that's been a kitchen designer for longer than a year, would have worked longer than a few weeks should have learned that already. that nobody's ceiling is perfectly level. And we have to level the cabinets to make it all work. So at some point in the room, your cabinets are going to be touching the ceiling and another part of the room, they're going to be three quarters or an inch away from the ceiling. You can't even stand up your top oven cabinet. Because it's 96 inches tall. And if your ceiling is 96 inches, it can't stand it up in the room, right? So you'd have to cut the toe kick off the cabinet, I guess. And it's really close and then rebuild it. And then you'd have a seam on the side of the oven cabinet. So whoever did this, don't buy a kitchen from them. They don't really know what they're doing. Yeah.

Speaker 2  16:39  
That's great feedback. This is our first home first kitchen renovation. So we don't know what we don't know.

Paul McAlary  16:45  
Yeah, I mean, you don't know Sure. It's not your job to know all this stuff. It's our job. It doesn't look good either. I mean, you want to have the cabinets and then what we do is we'd get we'd sell you 90 inch high cabinets with 36 inch drywall cabinets. And then you'd have what's called a stack to molding, one flat molding, and then maybe a cove molding and the flat molding would go up to the ceiling. And then the cove molding would right up and down on the flat molding, as the ceiling goes in and out a level. And then that looks much more attractive. If you look on our website, every kitchen that we have on our website or on we have 130 kitchens on our house page, there's there's no you won't find any pictures of a kitchen with a cabinets go up to the ceiling without any moldings on top or whatever, unless there was a some fit or something that they were going up to. But soffits are not popular anymore. Nobody wants soffits you're spending all this money to remove your soffits. Right. So you're trying to get rid of your soffits. So once you get rid of that you don't really want to do the same thing again, have cabinets go up to the ceiling, it just looks so much better. If there's a molding, and then and then the whole, everything can get leveled, you need to find a different place. Because the mistakes that this designers making are so elementary that they're dangerous. Yeah. So I would tell you that they're so elementary that even if you did go to Lowe's or Home Depot, almost all the designers that Lowe's and Home Depot will know better. Lowe's and Home Depot aren't known for their good kitchen designers because they pay them so poorly, that most really good designers will graduate, they may start at a home center, most of the designers that work for me and I used to work at a Lowe's and Home Depot 2530 years ago. So the you learn your trade and then you go up the ladder to work at a another kitchen place. But if you did this, just imagine a poor home center or Lowe's designer or Home Depot designer that sells the customer, your A Pichon and the cabinet's don't stand up in the room and they can't level and everything else, you're going to be in front of the manager of the Lowe's store or the Home Depot store complaining and that designer designing kitchens anymore, right? Yeah, yeah. So you will get a better designer, even at from a home center than this one. So you may want to shop around and talk to different designers find out how long they've been doing it or and you can always once you work on the design and make some changes or whatever you can always call back and we can sort of tweak whatever the thing is that you got. Even like right now in your kitchen, your you had a hood over your cooktop originally. And then either you or somebody else put a microwave over it. Well that's not really very functional, right? Because it's it's three inches too low or four inches too low. So if you're going to put a mic, put over your stove or your cooktop it's illegal in a fire hazard to have it as low as you have yours right now.

James  19:47  
Yeah, so it has to be bumped up.

Paul McAlary  19:49  
It has to be bumped up. So we're not supposed to be creating problems for you when we're designing a kitchen or selling you an appliance. Yeah, but any other Yeah,

Speaker 2  20:00  
well I got on board. So this has been really helpful.

Paul McAlary  20:04  
Yeah, I mean, you really have to start at the drawing board, what I'll try to, what I'll do is I'll print this thing out and over the weekend, maybe I'll send you a layout that I might do. But you also just as another warning, you have another you have a 33 inch Lazy Susan in the corner, that this designer, that's also terrible. A 33 inch Lazy Susan is going to be plastic probably. And then the opening is so small, you can't get anything in it. So always you want the Lazy Susan to be 36 inches wide 36 by 36, so that it can have a wooden Lazy Susan that sits on shelves, spins on ball bearings, and then has the opening big enough that you can actually reach in to get in there. So you have all of these narrow things that this designer just is so much of a novice that he's got a 12 inch cabinet on the left ear cooktop, a 12 inch cabinet on the radio cooktop, a nine inch cabinet to the right of your sink, a lazy susan cabinet that's too small, it's just compounded mistake and a three drawer base 24 inches wide. So any designer that works for me that sells that gets yelled at because a 24 inch cabinet means the inside of the drawer is 19 inches. And to have deep drawers that are 19 inches. You No wonder you could use as a breadbox. But the other drawer if it's only 19 inches wide. It's not pots and pans or anything. It's only 90. And you're just going to stack up a whole bunch of junk in it. Right? So yeah, so just a lot of bad selections. It's a good starting point, you're going to go to somebody else. And then you they'll probably say most of the things that I just said. And then you'll get a pitch and then we'll be tweaking instead of starting from scratch.

Speaker 2  21:51  
Yeah, I will do that. I will go back to the drawing board, find a new picking place to go to and I'll probably call you back. And yeah,

Paul McAlary  22:00  
and I'll send you a hand drawing that you can give to them and sort of store it. And you can decide when I do your hand drawing. Do you want me to leave the window as it is? Or do you want me to raise it up? Or do you want What do you want me to do?

Speaker 2  22:13  
i If you think raising it up would be fine. I'm not opposed to that my wife really likes the idea of raising it up. So

Paul McAlary  22:20  
okay, it won't be as expensive as you think it will give you all this really nice countertop. And actually, when I play around with this, when I'm sending you a messy drawing by hand, the whole thing will take me 20 minutes. So it won't be a big deal. But it will give you the ideas of what can happen. If you did that. You can take that and go from there.

James  22:41  
That'd be awesome. Thank you so much. Okay, good talking to you, James. And

Paul McAlary  22:44  
maybe we'll talk again in the future. Okay, sounds good. All right. Take care.

Mark Mitten  22:49  
Thank you for listening to the mainline kitchen design podcast with nationally acclaimed Kitchen Designer Paul maxillary. This podcast is brought to you by Brighton cabinetry, high quality custom cabinetry at competitive prices. For more on kitchen cabinets and kitchen design, go to www dot mainline kitchen design.com

Transcribed by https://otter.ai