Male singer 0:07 Paul Now listen here, folks about a fella named Paul thought Male singer 0:14 he knew kitchens better than a mall. Male singer 0:20 Measure every drawer, every hinge, every wall, tap his little notebook starting to scrawl, Female singer 0:27 his stubborn wife Julie, Female singer 0:31 crossed her arms tight. Both singers 0:36 Said, now that I see it that just don't look right. He'd born at the plan she'd squint at the floor, make that dag burn, think smaller or I'm out the door. It's the Both singers 0:50 Paul and Julie kitchen renovation. Don't fight it's a compromise situation. Both singers 0:58 He's got stacks. She's got ideas of her own, and that full Peninsula is just way too long. Yeah, that big Peninsula is just way too long, Male singer 1:07 that proud peninsula still way too long. Paul McAlary 1:21 Hello, welcome to better call Paul today, we're going to do things a little bit different. We don't have any callers. I have with me, my wonderful wife, Julie. Julie and I are going to discuss probably the question that gets asked to kitchen designers by our customers most often, and that question is, what does your kitchen look like? So Julie and I today are going to discuss our kitchen and the choices we made during our renovation and during the design process when we renovated our kitchen around 10 Julie 1:55 years ago now, and we're doing a podcast from that very kitchen. Paul McAlary 1:59 Yes, we're sitting at our lovely peninsula as we make this podcast. We have a view of the whole kitchen and everything that we did 10 years ago. I think maybe one place to start is with the decision to do the kitchen. Julie 2:17 I think the place we have to start is when we actually first me, and I said to you, it's very intimidating to go out with a kitchen designer. I happen to love my kitchen the way it is. I have no wall cabinets. And you looked at me aghast, and said, What holds up your oven hood? And I said, oven hood. I have a wall fan. Paul McAlary 2:40 So Julie had a wall fan. And as far as Julie was concerned, once we got married and we were living together, I moved into Julie's house. But as far as Julie was concerned, she had just done her kitchen before she met me, and it was perfect, yes, and she didn't believe she needed any kitchen updates, or anything else. She had pretty much of a brand new kitchen, and didn't really want to do a new kitchen. Julie 3:08 You should, you should clarify it. I had the kitchen redone with no design input, which is the first mistake many, many customers make. Paul McAlary 3:17 Yes, and the kitchen was brand new, but it was a bit of an embarrassment to me, because if it had been an old kitchen that needed to be redone, it wouldn't have been as distressing. Because when people that were in my industry or co workers or people came to my house, they would see the old kitchen and they would realize that it hadn't been updated, and this is probably the way it was when I moved in, and no one would be thinking that I was in any way responsible for this kitchen. But it was really a terribly, terribly designed kitchen. It had tons and tons of countertop, but the stove and the sink were within inches of each other, and then all this countertop and a refrigerator jutting out into the middle of the room. It was just a terribly flawed design. What precipitated us getting a new kitchen is sort of a funny story in that, you know, I was okay living with the kitchen, but every time I did have a friend that was in our industry, my industry, or co worker, come into my house. They would walk into the kitchen, and then there would be a startled look on their face, because they would see this relatively brand new kitchen that was so horribly designed. And since they knew about design, they would look at me, and then I would immediately have to explain and say, Oh no, I moved into my wife's house. She'd redesigned her kitchen just before we met. So I know it's a new kitchen, but no, I had nothing to do with this. There were two windows on the sink side of the room that were different heights and different sizes, and the sink was not centered in either. One of them, I don't believe it was off to one side of one of them. And I still had my wall band, and you had a wall fan. Yes, one day, one of the reps from Bishop cabinets came, and he was bringing a bunch of you were having a meeting, yeah, a bunch of upper management people from Jim Bishop with him, and we had designed some cabinetry for them. They still use a lot of the pictures of our kitchens on their website. And the Vice President had wanted to meet me personally, so I invited them over the house, and they came over the house, and we had nice coffee and coffee cake and, you know, some snacks and talk for 45 minutes or an hour or so, and then they left. And it was after they left that I realized that that whole thing happens every time somebody in my industry came into my kitchen of me explaining why I wasn't in any way responsible for this hadn't happened. And so I thought to myself, at first, at least, I thought, well, this is the vice president of the company. He's upper management. He doesn't really know anything about kitchen design, so he probably didn't even understand how poorly designed the kitchen was. And then I thought again, and I realized that now that's probably not what happened. What happened is my rep, Ken Adam, had warned everybody in the car on the way over that. Oh, and by the way, Paul's kitchen is a new kitchen, but his wife did it. It's no way is Paul in any way responsible for this kitchen. So when you see it, don't be alarmed that the kitchen might be something that Paul did once I realized that people were being warned on their way to our home to see our kitchen. Then that was the final straw that broke the camel's back and made me insist on redoing our kitchen. Julie 6:54 You should also explain you were having a meeting in the kitchen, because that was in the early stages of the company, when you and your designers would go out to everyone's home, we didn't even have offices yet. Paul McAlary 7:05 That's true. The first three years of the company, everything was mobile. You know, we had all these cases with all the door styles and finishes of all the cabinet brands we carry display cases. We went to the customer's house. We did the design work in the customer's house on our laptops so that they could see and we didn't have an office where customers would come in and look at displays and everything else. And it was after three years that we started having meetings in our office. And also at that point, then we could hook our laptops up to big flat screen TVs so customers could be looking at the designs on flat screen TVs on the walls while we were working on the designs. But that took three years, so yeah, at that point, all meetings took place in my home for people in the industry, and then all customers meetings took place in the customers homes. But at any rate, so we, we decided we were going to have to be this kitchen. And you know, much to Julie's dismay, especially because she was just happy with her present kitchen. But you Julie 8:12 know, we also had two teenagers, we were starting to pay for college, and wasn't ready to invest a huge amount to my kitchen. Paul McAlary 8:21 That's true. And then the way our finances worked is Julie and I sort of split everything when it comes to the home, so she was forced to cough up the money for half of a kitchen that she didn't think she needed. At any rate, we started working on the design, and much like all customers, we used 2020 software, 3d software, to work on the design, make changes to it. We had many iterations of the design with an island, without an island with a peninsula. That was the peninsula. Version of the kitchen is the the final version of the kitchen that we ended up choosing. But, uh, like most kitchens, the most important part of the whole process was creating a good design. And creating a good design means moving things around so that you create what can be a good kitchen. Never, never. Nobody should ever redo a kitchen and go to the great expense of redoing your kitchen and leave everything where it is. It's something that when you work with a professional, it really almost never happens, that it just too remote and too unlikely that your present kitchen layout is a good one, although probably most of our customers come to us believing that they're the layout that they have is fine, and they don't want to go to the expense of changing it, and we have to explain to them that changing the layout of your kitchen or major construction changes, like in our kitchen, we eliminated the two weird windows that were different sizes and different heights on the back wall of our kitchen and created a central. Window centered oil under the sink with three windows, two double hung windows on the end, and a casement window in the center, with the sink centered on that middle window. Julie 10:10 I actually have way, way back on my phone pictures of the original kitchen, and we can post it Paul McAlary 10:17 so people can see it. People can see the stove right next to the window, which is a fire hazard, and the sink not even centered under the window, and the wall fan and the wall fan over the top of the stove, and all the other problems that were associated with that the original kitchen. And the reason that kitchen was also so odd was that originally, our kitchen was three rooms. It was a kitchen, a butler's pantry and a dining room. The house was built in 19 what was it? 21 or so? I thought it was even before that. Julie 10:55 House is over 100 years old. Paul McAlary 10:57 House is over 100 years old. A butler's pantry and a dining room were part of the way most houses were being built in that era. So the most important part of our design for this kitchen was first making the space that we had the way Paul wanted it. No, look natural. Look like this room that was the combination of three rooms always had been and always was supposed to be one larger kitchen. And you know that meant getting closing the two windows that were on either side and opening up this big central triple window. It meant moving this refrigerator all the way to the corner, which we always try to do when we design kitchens, is move the tall, deep cabinets and appliances always into corners of the room, because that makes the room bigger, and then to move light fixtures and everything else, all to naturalize the space that we were creating our kitchen for, Julie 11:58 we should state that one thing we did have was A nice sized space. We weren't challenged by a cramped space. Paul McAlary 12:03 Yeah, we weren't really challenged by a cramped space. But when we started, we thought maybe we wanted an island, but when you leave enough space to do the island, it didn't really succeed as well, because it wasn't really long enough to really be a really nice Island, since it couldn't succeed as being a really big and nice Island, that's really why we ended up with the peninsula. It gave us more countertop. It gave us continuous countertop well, and it gave us more seating. I really Julie 12:35 didn't want an island. You just wanted to see if it was possible. But we have so many customers contact us intent on an island, and it actually doesn't work in their space, and they do themselves a favor by changing their minds. Yeah? Paul McAlary 12:48 I mean, that's sometimes people just want the thing that they want, even if it ruins their home and makes their home so tight that makes it awkward. Yeah, yeah, that, you know, people can't even open the refrigerator door and stand in front of the refrigerator. But so, you know, we we got the basic design of our kitchen down. Julie and I had some disagreements on style, and one of our disagreements was I wanted a microwave drawer. Oh, yeah, that wasn't in the in the in the kitchen, for whatever reason. I can't tell you, Julie, do you? Can you tell us why you didn't want the microwave draw or Julie 13:28 didn't want a microwave drawer? I didn't Paul McAlary 13:30 want to bend down for the microwave. We don't really have to bend. Julie 13:33 I like it where it is. Paul McAlary 13:34 She likes it over the stove. So Julie really wanted a microwave over the stove. This is 10 years ago, so a slide in range, back 10 or 11 years ago, was about $1,000 more than a range with a back on it. And if we weren't going to have a hood over our stove and we were going to have a microwave, then you economize. It didn't really hurt. The look very much. I just said, well, we might as well just get a stove with a back on it, since having a slide in range would sort of be a waste when you're putting a very utilitarian microwave hood over the top of it. Julie 14:07 So we've been living in this kitchen 10 years at least. I have no regrets about not having a microwave drawer, and to this day you would still prefer it, right? Oh, sure, yeah. And so that's one of many, illustrations, and I hear you talk to customers about it often. It's a compromise. Each person in the family gets most of what they want, but you have to compromise with each other. Paul McAlary 14:30 And ultimately, as long as it was a well designed kitchen, I was happy, and as long as the microwave hood vented outside, so if we were cooking fish or something very smoky, all the smoke and grease, etc. Julie 14:43 And as long as she got rid of the break front that I loved, Paul McAlary 14:47 you know, at the time, we had a little bit of a disagreement on style and kind of wood. Julie had wanted a Quaker door style, and I had wanted a Shaker door style. And then I, at the time, had wanted a pen. Painted cabinet that wasn't happening and truly wanted a wood cabinet. So we had a compromise, and our compromise was to get a shaker, which is similar to a Quaker door style, and then we got in a light maple finish that now in retrospect, painted cabinets are still so much more popular than stained cabinets, and maple even isn't one of the most popular woods anymore, but I'm very happy with it because it requires no maintenance. Maple is the hardest wood. Painted cabinetry has to be touched up, and refinishers come in maybe every five or 10 years. Maple cabinetry is pretty much indestructible and it's natural. It will never be out of style. It's simple and natural wood color, so it really is never going to be out of style, but it certainly probably will. It's unlikely that it will be one of the most popular finishes in colors. It'll never be jaw dropping. But it also doesn't require any of the maintenance that other woods and other finishes might have required. I also wanted oak that you vetoed. Oh, that's that we're gonna well nowadays, quarter sawn oak is very popular and has a very different Paul McAlary 16:11 look that wasn't Paul McAlary 16:13 even really a very available thing 11 years ago. Julie 16:16 But I interjected with that, because we're talking about compromises. You bought something, so I got something. Sure. That's the way it worked. Paul McAlary 16:23 And when it came down to countertops, the camera did. And back 11 years ago, nowadays, probably 95 pretended that our customers get quartz countertops. But quartz, 11 years ago, was just starting out as this countertop surface, and it was very granular looking and not very attractive. The quartz countertops today look very naturally. Look like real marble. They have all kinds of fascinating patterns and colors and brains, but back then, quartz, engineered stone just didn't really look great. So we were probably reduced to getting either quartzite, and quartzite can have some issues of its own, because a lot of times quartzite will have marble in it, and so it'll be easier to scratch and easier to etch. Or we had a fine wasn't Julie 17:18 it also expensive quartzite? Quartzite. Paul McAlary 17:20 Quartzite is relatively expensive than the less expensive granites, but you know, when we were looking for granite, we had picked one that was a pretty light, I believe it was giallo ornamento, that was a pretty light, inexpensive granite, which I could have definitely lived with. And I think it's the lightest granite that's at the lower price point. But at one point after we would sort of settled on that, Julie disappeared. Julie 17:47 I It's a big decision. The granite is a big decision. And we went, we blew our budget on the countertop, and I don't think either one of us regrets it for a minute. Paul McAlary 18:00 No. Julie found a much yellow, ornamental is a nice color, inexpensive color, if you're trying to get a more marble, like looking countertop. But Julie found a really beautiful, I think it was a level eight, seven or eight countertop, six, that was much more attractive and that, you know, in retrospect, I always tell customers, too, that once we spent the money on it, now we get to enjoy it. It's, it's certainly a much nicer town countertop. It has a lot of Garnet in it. It has a lot of translucence in it. So you can actually see into the stone in a lot of places. And so when I'm eating at our peninsulas and having breakfast or lunch or whatever. A lot of times I really enjoy looking at our countertop. And if it was giallo ornamental, that probably wouldn't be the case. I mean, I wouldn't have been unhappy with it, but I wouldn't have enjoyed it as much as the top that we ended up selecting. Julie 18:53 We're 10 years into this kitchen, and we still periodically, like at least once a month, come down and comment on how much we actually enjoy it. Is something like this available these days in courts, because that's manufactured, because this is the naturalness of this makes it so random and varied. Well, that's the Paul McAlary 19:12 thing too, is that when you get a stained cabinet like we have, then you can go with the engineered stone, the engineered stone looks much more natural than it used to, but a lot of times, the natural quartzite or the natural stones look a little bit nicer, or at least go a little bit better with natural wood colors, if that's what your customers are picking versus you know, whether it's soap stone or whatever the natural color is. Whereas, when you're getting painted cabinets, which is the vast majority of the cabinets that we sell, then you can get the engineered stone that looks completely and totally appropriate. And they have come so far that the colors can be really beautiful. Julie 19:56 And the bottom line is, every designer at mainline kitchen design. Knows all the possibilities so well that when you're working with them, they can give you guidance. And I get to live with that 24 soon. Paul McAlary 20:09 Then some of the other things that we picked back 11 years ago, porcelain tile that looks like wood, was something that was brand new, and we ended up choosing it, and that's something that I like. I really like a lot, that it's essentially indestructible. We don't have to worry about scratching or damaging our floor. It totally looks nice with real hardwood floors that we have in our house. Our porcelain tile was a first generation. They have now have much more authentic, and distress just very fascinating looking porcelain tiles that look like wood. It's a great alternative in a kitchen if you're looking for durability. And that was sort of the I'm hard on things, and I don't like to have to do a lot of maintenance. So that was something that we were I think we're both really very happy that we chose Julie 21:01 we love, love, love this tile. The things that I love about it is it's easy to clean, but we should comment. We were warned, and we took this into consideration. It gets cold in the winter, so we're a family that wears slippers and shoes in the house that doesn't impact us, and on the few times in your life that you drop a plate or a glass, it's going to shatter, those tiles are hard. But we are as thrilled with the floor decision we made as we are with the countertop decision that Paul McAlary 21:34 we made. One of the things Julie was adamant about, too was that she didn't want under cabinet lighting Absolutely he thought it messed up the look of the bottom of the cabinets, and you can see the wires that you look under the air. And he didn't want it. And I was okay not getting it for two reasons. One, we have a lot of overhead lighting, recess lighting in our ceiling. But also, I knew it we weren't really very far away from a time when you'd be able to do it led under cabinet lighting via battery, which actually now we have a kit that I'm going to put underneath our cabinets. There won't be any wires that anybody can see, and the lights will be very easy to maintain. And they're on a battery, and you can either have the motion activated or they can be activated through a remote control. But they're much less obvious intrusive, and they're very inexpensive, whereas running all the under cabinet lighting and fishing all those lines and buying the under cabinet lighting probably with the cost of the contractor and the cost of the lighting back even when we did, it would have been maybe $1,200 that was the number. I was right. And, you know, now it's just the lighting pack that I think was like 65 bucks. So it's, that's how much something under cabinet lighting changes over. You know, it's really a 10 year period of time. It's 11 from when we started, but 10 years from, probably very close to 10 years from when the kitchen was finished to now Julie 23:02 I still uncle to meter. Paul McAlary 23:05 Why don't we tell the funny story about our Peninsula? Julie 23:09 Want me to tell? Paul McAlary 23:11 Wait, don't you both tell. Then the cabinets were installed, and we were waiting for the countertop people to come out and do the template, but that was when amongst the cabinets were completely installed. Then Julie, really, I guess, got a better sense, or an exact sense of the space, and she decided that our peninsula was too Julie 23:31 long. Our Peninsula is too long. Paul McAlary 23:35 And she decided that it was exactly 18 inches longer than she would have liked. It is too long by one drawer bank. And so what she wanted to do was we had already scheduled the template for the templaters to come from the countertop company. What she wanted to do was pull out that 18 inch drawer base, move everything over. It would have meant that we would have had a redo that area and, you know, make some other adjustments, etc, and then we wouldn't have had that drawer bank. But that's one thing that I put my foot down, because when you're designing, when you're looking at a space and you're second guessing yourself, that's a way to really get into the weeds and make a lot of mistakes. You have many, many appointments with the designers. Julie had seen the design in three dimensions on look like that, yeah, whatever. She had seen the design in three dimensions on laptops, on big screen TVs, etc, and had decided that that's what she wanted. So I said, Listen, we're going to get it the way it is. If you really want we can have you live with it for a year or six months, and if it really is a that disturbing for you, we can have them recut the countertop and shorten it. I can pull out the cabinet and move everything over, and then we have that. Extra tile, we can re tile the floor. It's a lot of work, but it's not going to hold us up another week because of the template. And also it's second guessing yourself when these things are going in is always, in my opinion, a bad idea. Julie 25:13 So six months passes, the peninsula is still too long. To this day, the peninsula is still too long. And however, however, as we've already stated, We love the countertop and we love the floor tile, and I did not want to take a chance to damage that by adjusting things. So I have left it the however, and you may finish the story, Paul McAlary 25:41 Julie is, I think she would even admit that she's a relatively stubborn person, so she refuses to use the 18 inch cabinet in our kitchen. So there's nothing that she wants or wants to do that's in that cabinet. That was the cabinet I had designed the kitchen for where the knives, fork, spoons and other utensils would all go, which doesn't make sense, but we have a 15 inch shortness, but we have a 15 inch cabinet on the right side of our dishwasher that she uses, and I just adapted or adopted a new policy whenever I'm giving a gift to Julie. Started with she had a particularly rough day, and I wanted to do something nice for her, so I went out and I actually bought her diamond earrings. But after I bought them, then I wrapped it, and then I put it in the drawer of her 18 inch cabinet. So I make, I make her go into that drawer, those drawers to get her presence, or at least whatever unexpected presence that I ever come up with to give her, Julie 26:44 except for the presents. Those drawers do not exist. But if Paul likes to put things in them, I move them, Paul McAlary 26:52 I guess. You know, just as far as it's very we have a lot of simple things that are sort of nice. We have subway tile that's a little bit bigger than normal subway tile. It's also glass, which is a little bit nice that you can see into it. Julie 27:07 Selecting the subway tile, selecting the back splash, though, was a big challenge for us. It was one of the last things we did, and we really covered a lot of turf looking we wanted it to be right, and we didn't. It took us a while, Paul McAlary 27:18 and it definitely coordinates well with the colors of our windows and the colors of Julie 27:23 the camera, we should admit that we got it at a home center. Yeah, we got our knobs at a you said it they're top knobs, but I think we got them at a home center. No, they actually are. There are top knobs. They're at a home center. Yeah, before we sold knobs, right? I love already. So we didn't sell knobs at that time that we some. We were having a knob conversation yesterday with people in our office. I love our knobs. Paul McAlary 27:44 You know the kitchen, just in general, the design of our kitchen, when you're looking at it, you can be the judge on whether you think the peninsula is too long. I think when you look at the pictures and you look at the video, that you'll agree with me and not with Julie, that the peninsula Julie 28:02 is was adjusting to having something in the kitchen, and I still miss my very, very open kitchen cart. The other thing is just popped into my head that I don't think we've talked about for years, is when we were doing initial design, you suggested corbels, which like so not me. Paul McAlary 28:20 I don't know what that would have been. Why don't stuff down here of me, corvals on on the back of the island that would have been too ornate with the door style. Julie 28:28 We also had the conversation about the pollution of the shelves. I mean, there was a lot of stuff going on, Paul McAlary 28:34 but just universal things that choices that we made in the kitchen that are always good ideas is we have a really big single bowl sink, which is a very good idea, large pots, pans, trays, cookie sheets, all fit in our sink. Some people might think that having a two bowl sink, one big bowl and one small bowl, is a good idea, but that's a really antiquated design feature, Julie 29:00 and I think we didn't get a farm sink just it's not our esthetic, right? That's why we didn't go for farm sink. No, I Paul McAlary 29:07 think we didn't get a farm sink because a farm sink damages the cabinet underneath, so that it would be require more maintenance, and, you know, an undermount sink. But what happens with a farm sink is the water drips down the front of the apron of the farm sink and collects on the doors below the farm sink. And then we know, as kitchen designers, that generally, after about five years, the cabinet below the farm sink, unless you're some cow and very fastidious, gets destroyed. And we would be replacing those doors, replacing those cabinets, Maple changes color over time. So whenever we replace the cabinets, well, then the cabinet doors, then we wouldn't have matching cabinets for another year until that batch of maple had changed colors back into the original. So it was just for durability, I think, and also for lack of maintenance. Julie 29:56 One of the feature our kitchen has that I would be astonished. Punished that any other customer ran into. But it's fun to talk about is I had a very large pantry closet, and that's what allowed me to have no wall cabinets. But because it's an older home, we don't have a lot of closets. We never had a coat closet, and we were making a decision what to do with the pantry closet, and we literally have a fairly large closet that is half coat closet, half pantry closet. We love it. We have a place to hang our posts and a place to put the canned soup. And my daughter, who is now in her 30s, never fails to comment when she goes to hang up her coat. It's the stupidest thing I've ever seen putting my coat next to the canned goods, but it works Paul McAlary 30:39 a lot. We enlarge the opening and put French doors into this check. And one side of the French doors is the food closet, and the other side of the French doors is canned goods in our pantry. And then a lot of things that are very typical. On one side of our sink we have a double trash can pull out. On the other side of our sink is a dishwasher. That's sort of a very universal concept, our refrigerator is in the corner of the room with an entry on one side, so that the freezer door, it's a side by side, refrigerator can open all the way without hitting anything, and the cabinets that they're in case the refrigerator are all pulled out a couple of inches, so that our countertop dies into the panel that's on The side of the refrigerator. Julie 31:22 And the other thing that was already in place before we started the redesign, and if it wasn't in place, you would have changed it is the first floor powder room. Is around the corner. It does not open into the kitchen or any eating area, which is not only illegal, but unappealing to many. Paul McAlary 31:40 Yeah, so it's open into our one little area, and just some of the other features that we have in our kitchen that are sort of universal. Is very close to our stove. We have pots and pans drawers. We have a tray base on one side of the stove. We have two easy reach cabinets, one that has a lazy susan inside of it, in the one corner on the left side of the stove, and then an easy reach cabinet with folding doors with just shelves in it on the right side of the stove to put wocks and other pots and pans and things that don't really wouldn't really go well on a lazy Susan. Julie 32:15 You periodically have customers that fight you on a lazy Susan. What's the school of thought on the Lazy Susans. Paul McAlary 32:23 People have the Lazy Susans, the old fashioned Lazy Susans. That didn't probably work as well. But you know, always how you access a corner is one of the things in kitchen design that is problematic. It's hard to get to a corner, and people see some of the fancy blind corner cabinet mechanisms, like a Le Mans or a magic corner with all these a peanut that like folds out of the cabinet, a magic corner where things are sliding and then pulling out, and everything else. But those, those solutions for blind corners really are only supposed to be used when we can't get an easy reach, 36 inch easy reach cabinet into the corner and then, I mean, that's the name of the cabinet. It's called the way the door folds. It's an easy reach cabinet because it's the easiest way to reach the corners in your kitchen, whether customers understand that or not. And you know, customers are so fixated a lot of the times on gadgets that they think that the preferred thing is a blind cabinet with some of these unusual gadgety features. But in reality, they're much more expensive, easy to break over time, bump into things and hit things like your stove and the doors other cabinets, sometimes when they swing out, et cetera. Just simpler when you're designing a kitchen, simpler often is the best use of the space. Julie 33:56 We have never had an issue with the Lazy Susan. I think it maximizes the space, and we really have never had an issue in this kitchen period. There is nothing we've had to do. It just speaks to the durability of every product that you sell. Paul McAlary 34:13 Yeah, it's 11 years in. We picked all very durable things, and there's not a nick or a scratch, and we are hard on things. Fall is hard on things there's, there's really not a nick or a scratch or, you know, when you have a natural, natural wood color, when you do get a nick or a scratch, it's pretty much invisible because the wood underneath is the same color. But, yeah, so that just so, for anybody listening, that's, you know, gives you an insight into the process, into the give and take and compromise. There's a lesson to be learned from the whole thing. It's that moving things around, like the windows that we two windows that we closed, and then the window with the two. Double hung windows and the picture window in the middle that really make this whole kitchen attractive and look like it makes sense that the outside of our house is stucco. The stucco work that the guy did, He charged me around $1,200 charged us $1,200 to redo the stucco on the outside of the house, and that looks really good. It's been painted that same color, and you could barely even tell that there was anything other than these windows there. The windows themselves are very simple, double hung windows from a really good double hub window company, but they were only $200 each, so we got 246, $100 in Windows, $1,200 in stucco work, and then installing the windows and closing the other two windows, all that framing and everything else. Jack Garner, the contractor that did the construction, he was able to do that and, you know, before lunchtime one day. So that cost us a few $100 the whole thing was definitely cost us less than $2,500 Jack Julie 36:05 also did, do you remember this? Jack also did something amazing. We have one of the original windows from the house, and it has a somewhat intricate molding. It has several layers of the molding, and Jack used multiple layers of plywood that he assembled together, almost like tiered. It like an inverted wedding cake that it should match the original molding. And we were awed by it. Paul McAlary 36:30 It wasn't plywood, honey, it was individual pieces of mold, okay, whatever he Julie 36:34 matched that molding. And it was just, that's the extra when, when you recommend a contractor, it's not just jack that does that when you pick when there are contractors that you'll recommend, and that's the kind of workmanship you look for from them. And yeah, it's very special. Paul McAlary 36:49 You want the intricate moldings that we have around our windows and doors when you redo a space, you want it always to look like this kitchen was made for the space, and not like what many people's kitchens look like. Here's the space I had, and here's how I jammed the kitchen with the things that I wanted into that space. It never looks like it belongs. It never looks like it's natural. That's a design failure. You know, moving all the things, the gas line and everything else that we had to move to do all this stuff might have been $4,000 or something like that, but that $4,000 when you're spending this kitchen probably would have cost maybe $70,000 in today's money, and spending $4,000 or less than 10% of the cost of the whole project to move things around, to make it this space that looks natural is always worth Julie 37:46 it well, and also $70,000 that we are more than positive we'll recoup when we sell the house, or just when people walk in, they're awed by this kitchen. Two other points. One back to the things that Jack did. Everything was anticipated in the initial estimate. There are no surprises after the fact. They don't come. Oh, I didn't expect this. I didn't expect that. It's not like the drama in HDTV, which is manufactured. It was a real and reliable and expert estimate. And then a funny aspect that I think you forgot is our kitchen opens up to our dining room, and we were definitely going to treat ourselves to a new dining room table, and I wanted a round, light, wooded table to for the style of the kitchen to match it. We have a dark, bar height table that we absolutely love. So you don't always go the way you think you're gonna go. And here it is. More than 10 years after we finished the project, we still love it. We laugh about the Bank of drawers that I won't use. And we made it through the project. There were moments, but we made Paul McAlary 38:52 it Yeah. Paul McAlary 38:54 One of the moments, I don't know how long have we been talking, but one of the moments that was sort of funny, that really was a little bit frustrating for Julie was after our kitchen was ripped out, and we were living in our living room with a refrigerator and a microwave and everything that up, everything, one of my customers at the time, their contractor that we had sent out contractors to them To give them estimates, but they had found the person on their own that they wanted to hire because they thought they knew better, and that contractor didn't know what he was doing. Might have been a couple of $1,000 less than Jack Gardner was, but didn't know what he was doing, walked off the job after they had paid him almost all the money, and that now they had no contractor, and their whole home was disrupted. So I actually had Jack stop the work on our kitchen and go over to that customer's kitchen, finish the job. And he had to redo a lot of electric and redo a lot of plumbing that wasn't done up to code. And he had to finish their pitch. And I think it was probably. Be gone for almost three weeks, right? I think we had a six week delayed. I don't know if it was that long, but maybe it seems like it, but we really had to put up with no kitchen for I know it was at least three weeks. Maybe it was four weeks before Jack could come back to our kitchen and get back to doing ours. Julie 40:16 That was manageable for two reasons. One, our children were at school, away at college, so we didn't have children to cook for. And two, that really is the standard of care we have at the company. It's a small company. We care about every single customer, and if somebody needs something, we do it. That happened to be what we did that. But that's why we did that. Yes, we both remember that wealth. Paul McAlary 40:40 And we also said, you know, we also do go out to dinner very often. We go out, especially now, we go out to dinner probably six nights a week. But back then, even once our kids were in college, we we were going out to dinner five or five nights a week. Julie 40:56 Go out, but we work from home often, and we spend a great deal of time in the kitchen, and part of the reason we go out is because we strategize about the company a lot. Yeah, it's Paul McAlary 41:05 true too. So okay, so that just gives everybody an insight into our kitchen. Look at the pictures, see what you think. See if you think the peninsula is too big, notice this. Look at the windows, see what you think about that. And watch Jack's video of the whole progression of our original kitchen to the new kitchen, and thanks for listening. Julie 41:28 I hope you enjoy spending a little time in our kitchen. Paul McAlary 41:31 That's true. Thanks all the best. Mark Mitten 41:35 Thank you for listening to the mainline kitchen design podcast with nationally acclaimed Kitchen Designer Paul McAlary, this podcast was 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, and Male singer 42:02 now listen here, folks about a fella named Paul thought he knew kitchens better than a mall. Measure every drawer, every hinge, every wall tap his little notebook, starting to scrawl. Female singer 42:34 His stubby wife, Julie, crossed her arms tight, said, now that I see it, that just don't look right. He'd point at the plant. She'd squint at the floor. Make that dag burn. Think smaller or I'm out the door. Both singers 42:46 It's the Paul and Julie kitchen renovation. Don't fight it's a compromise situation. He's got stats. She's got ideas of her own. And that full Peninsula is just way too long. Yeah, that big Peninsula is just way too long. You Female singer 43:20 Paul St Paul said, I'm a kitchen genius, and that's no lie. Julie said, make the counter shorter, at least you could try. Male singer 43:37 He slid the tape measure. She kicked a shoe. If I bruise one hip, I'm blaming you. Male singer 43:44 Hey, it's the Paul and Julie kitchen renovation. He's chasing style. She wants circulation. He's got charts. She's humming a stubborn song, cause that long Peninsula, way too long. Long that proponents love, still way too long. Transcribed by https://otter.ai