Browse Forums Kitchen Corner 1 Feb 08, 2009 10:27 pm I am renovating my kitchen which is located within an apartment on the 2nd floor of a 3 floor apartment block. The apartment is located within the lower north shore (Sydney).
I’d love to get your ideas/comments on the concept below (e.g. colour scheme, placement of appliances, anything else, etc.). I have included the current kitchen’s photos and also a diagram with measurements. Also suggestions on what price range I should be expecting will be great! The design will essentially be a U shape with the fridge on the other side so it is more hidden and instead the current fridge location will be replaced by benchtops. MICHELLE’S COLOUR TEMPLATE Splashback - Undecided. I like the look of Calcutta marble but I am not sure how expensive/practical it would be. My other preferences (in order) are glass, acrylic, stainless steel, tiles. Benchtop - Ceasarstone 50mm mitred edge in a light colour (e.g. Snow? Osprey?) Cupboard doors – Antique White USA to match the existing in-built wardrobes? I am thinking of getting the cupboards to go up to the ceiling. Cabinets – Antique White USA Draws – Antique White USA Kickboard – either a metallic colour or matching the cupboard door colour Hardware/Taps – stainless steel Handles – perhaps no handles? If handles are used, stainless steel. Feature lighting – I am thinking of LED lighting at the top of the splashback and at the bottom of the benchtop surface Lighting – just retain the existing oyster light? Flooring – something which matches with the light beiege ceramic tiles in the laundry which is next to the kitchen (where the door leads to in the diagram). Or something that matches what is in the living room (I am undecided on ceramic tiles in the living room or wood or carpet – obviously not carpet in the kitchen though). Window shade – Antique White USA to match the cabinet colour? Walls – Antique White USA APPLIANCES Oven – Bosch Electric Oven HBN731551ASS [595H x 595W x 548D] as it is available widely (i.e. which helps in getting a discount) and is pyrolitic Stove - Bosh 60cm Induction Hob PIE675T01E [57.4H x 592W x 520D] which I am not too fussed over Dishwasher - Bosch Dishwasher SGV69T15AU [810-870H x 598W x 550D] as it is available widely and has the LED InfoLight which I thought was a good idea Microwave - Bosch Microwave HMT9656AU [388H x 595W x 570D] as it is available widely and can match the oven Rangehood – I am undecided on the exact model/brand. 600mm retractable rangehood with metallic finish and recirculated air operation Fridge - 700mm single door fridge. I will probably retain existing fridge Sink - Oliveri Professional Series Sink 1163U [510L x 840W x 255D] as I like the stainless steel and square look Food waste disposal unit – I am thinking of including a In Sink Erator Food Waste Disposer 75 but I am not sure whether it is a good idea? Filtered water tap - Zip Chilled & Filtered Water 76121. I have heard complaints about the much more expensive Zip Hydrotap (they seemingly break down and are expensive to repair)? Kitchen tap – A pull-out tap of some description. As an example, Franke Pull Out Tap TA781CH. Any and all advice is warmly welcome! Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ good luck 2Feb 09, 2009 7:57 pm Hi there,
I saw your post and wanted to wish you good luck with the kitchen renovation. I have just finished mine and I mean that quite literally as the painter left this afternoon! I have no real advice but to wish you good luck and to tell you that this site is just wonderful. All my mini-dramas have been answered either directly or indirectly by looking through old posts. I have endless admiration for those who conduct renovation work on entire house. I have found doing the kitchen to be an exhausting process and I am not in a hurry to undergo any more changes just yet. Truly I don't know how people manage it. I was quite fed up with the dust and few after just a few days and the charm of microwave frozen meals disappeared quite quickly! Only two tips I have worth passing on - advertise your old kitchen (newspaper, not ebay) and it will sell. I could have sold mine several times over! It was worth it in the end because it paid for my new refrigeration with ice and water dispenser (which was the only request my husband made). Second tip is for the wall paint - Dulux Stowe White - looks lovely with my antique white cupboards - just enough colour to be interesting and not enough to detract from the beautiful cabinets and granite benchtop. Good luck! Reply to gersy1964 3Feb 10, 2009 12:08 pm Hi gersy1964,
Thanks for the kind words! Yes, I am sensing it will be a long process given the need to integrate a number of components (e.g. the base cabinets with appliances, pluming, benchtops, etc.). The bathroom renovation which I completed around 12 months ago looks far more simple (i.e. just plumbing, select some tiles, a vanity unit, toilet, bathub, and leave the rest to the staff). So people buy old kitchens do they? Very interesting. I was going to pay someone to demolish it and send it to the tip. Turning an expense into an income source sounds like a great idea!! I'll keep Dulux Stowe White in mind. I hope you enjoy your new kitchen. celco Re: Advice on kitchen renovation concept + colour scheme 4Feb 10, 2009 1:44 pm I love white kitchens, my girlfriend did the same colour scheme as you
Caesarstone Snow benchtop, Antique White cabinets and she used White Watsonia in star fire glass - it looks beautiful. I'm having a white kitchen too - you can check out my colour scheme on my blog if you wish. Re: Advice on kitchen renovation concept + colour scheme 5Feb 10, 2009 4:14 pm Nice layout - I love those Le Mans corner solutions!
My only concern would be having the dishwasher right next to one of the corners - obviously you won't be able to access that corner unit when the dishwasher door is open. How about getting the dishwasher under the sink drainer (allowing about 1500 total space for this) and sacrifice the pot drawer next to the sink for two narrow door units either side of the sink/DW ensemble instead? Are you planning on having no wall units at all? Otherwise you could hang the microwave to the right of the doorway where your wall oven currently is and fill the rest of the space to the window wall with doors - this would give you back the space of the deleted pot drawers under the cutlery drawer. Just a thought... Cheers, Earl Re: Advice on kitchen renovation concept + colour scheme 6Feb 10, 2009 7:59 pm Firstly I reckon your colours are great.
Secondly.... WOW, thats gunna be expensive! Maybe $20,000? Thirdly, how big do you plan to make the fridge space? I would suggest that you make it 1000mm wide to accommodate bigger fridges in the future. ie when you sell. By your plan, if the fridge space is 1000mm you will then only have a pantry 275mm wide... Also try to put a tap in the fridge space while you are remodeling. It looks like a good project. Keep us updated! Re: Advice on kitchen renovation concept + colour scheme 7Feb 10, 2009 8:31 pm Do people buy old kitchens? They sure do! Quite amazing really and the beauty of it is that you
1. Make money with the sale 2. Save money on the renovation (less labour for installation team) 3. Don't have an extra pile of rubbish for the tip 4. Actually feel good about recycling! Re: Advice on kitchen renovation concept + colour scheme 8Feb 10, 2009 8:46 pm Hi celco,
We are currently also doing up our lower north shore top floor 2bdrm apartment's kitchen (also in a 3 floor building) Excellent choice with your appliances!....We picked Bosch oven and cooktop too but I decided to go with a more basic one of their ovens and a good touch cooktop but ceramic not induction as id rather save a bit of money here.....I reckon in this area of LNS I am in apartment appliances are not generally top of the range with all the bells and whistles but somewhere in the middle to top - good brands but more basic styles....it of course depends where on the LNS u are!... similarly I would rather save the money on the sink so I didnt want to look at oliveri and their 700+ sinks...instead we choose a cheaper but still australian brand/same factory made 'lakeland' sink...but oliveri is nice and if you can afford it...go for it! I think the caesar stone will look awesome in your apartment and the colours you have picked sound great.....we are going for 30mm Ice Snow as I thought 40mm and bigger was too chunky but thats a matter of choice... I would question whether you need a garbage disposal? (these creep me out and they make me think of someones hand getting caught in them..but my feelings aside Im not sure that many apartments would have or need them anyway?).....or even a filtered water tap? (I would LOVE one of these taps as I love the convienience but I wouldnt bother paying to put one in an apartment - also dont they take up quite a bit of under-sink space?...at least the one at my work seems to...it also seems to break alot!) Good luck with it all!!.... Oh and I would think your kitchen will be around 25-30k based on the sound of what you want in it and of course who you get to do the work? Re: Advice on kitchen renovation concept + colour scheme 9Feb 11, 2009 10:50 pm Hi Everyone,
Thanks for all the replies! hermyleen: thanks for the kind words. your blog looks great! Strumer: thanks - I became quite excited by the Le Mans when I worked out what it was for! Ah you are right about the dishwasher being in a bad place since it would get in the way of the Le Mans - the reason I was thinking of putting the dishwasher there was because it is on the right hand side of the sink so I thought it would be nice and convenient (I am right handed). Yeah I think your suggestion is quite good! I am having wall units on 2 sides (not on the window side obviously) sorry my PowerPoint design skills aren't so advanced! Renosmakeweweary: thanks for the encouragement. Yeah I suppose the maximum I am thinking of spending is $20,000 or so? Originally I was thinking $15,000 but if I am getting Bosch appliances, the glass splashback, Caesarstone benchtops, plus the additional pantry/fridge area....I realised perhaps my budget was a bit unrealistic. That said, around a year or so ago I obtained a quote from Wholesale Kitchens in Willoughby to just replace the entire kitchen and replicate the current design using new materials - the total quote including appliances came to $11,000. Based on my now vague memory as I lost the quote, I think it was for laminate benchtops with entry-level Whirlpool appliances. Yeah you picked up on my worry about the fridge! I wanted some sort of pantry and I thought the best place to hide an upright one will be next to the fridge in the corner. I deliberately put the fridge on the right hand side so if the person has a big fridge it will still fit - they will just have problems getting into the laundry room I dunno - you think the pantry should be made smaller? I was thinking perhaps that people will only have a 1 door fridge rather than a 2 door? What do you mean by a tap in the fridge space? Do you mean a water pipe which can be connected to one of those water dispensing units in a high-end fridge? Or? gersy1964: Thanks for the tip! I will definitely look into it. Sonty: Yeah I totally agree with you about the appliances! I started an Excel spreadsheet of the cost of all the appliances I was thinking of and it came to around $11,000 which is rather obscene when I consider that the overall budget was supposed to be around $20,000. I will probably look into downgrading into cheaper models of Bosch products. I'm in Chatswood. Yeah I just randomly picked a sink to be honest I havent really done much product comparison yet - I found the whole planning part a bit time consuming to be honest and I just wanted to fill in the boxes!! I will look into the lakeland sink. Yeah I actually had a bad dream about the garbage disposal system - I dreamt that I was washing and then a knife fell into it and then I put my hand in to get it forgetting that it was a disposal unit and my hand getting chopped off (laughs). Yeah I wanted the Zip HydroTap but it tends to break down in my workplace as well. My thinking is that a normal water purifier is $300 or so....while the nice chilled one is $1,000 lol so I was thinking hmmm I drink large amounts of water each day so that could be my personal luxury....I dunno....the whole water filter part worries me since the apartment might be put up for rent in 5 years or so time I am getting quotes this weekend so I'll see what happens. Another idea is that I get a real estate agent to value the property and give his/her advice as to what will add the most capital value/income potential The apartment itself is seemingly worth $500,000 or so. I have spent $13k on a bathroom/laundry rennovation which turned out extremely well (used man in a van rather than renovation company who wanted 'at least $20k' for a cut down version of my design, ebay for ceramic taps/accessories, frameless shower screen, custom made mirror, etc), $6k on inbuilt wardrobes (a place in blacktown - the north shore ones wanted $3k+ per wardrobe and I had 3 to do), $6k on a split system airconditioning system so the entire apartment is airconditioned, $2k upgrading all the electricals (automatic garage door opener, replaced all the lighting, replaced all light switches + powerpoints, upgraded the 25 year old power supply to handle the huge increase in electricity needed for all the new stuff). My worry is I dont want to overcapitalise but by the same token I dont want to feel like I did an unnecessarily cheap job and then regret it! I feel it is often a thin line... celco Re: Advice on kitchen renovation concept + colour scheme 10Feb 12, 2009 1:59 pm Maybe put it this way around??
http://i47.photobucket.com/albums/f160/ChunkyCharcoal/kitchen_model_v2.gif I reckon a wide fridge space is a must for a new kitchen. Kinda future proofing it if you know what I mean... Also the cost of installing a water purifier at the sink is crazy when you can get chilled & purified water straight from the fridge! I'm renovating - building a small extension at the back of the late Edwardian house. This is the first stage. Second stage of the renovation will be to replace roof on… 0 1062 Assuming the structure of your cabinetry is good then I would DIY everything as follows: - replace your counter tops entirely, - replace all drawer runners with soft close… 1 4779 I recently went through a similar renovation and move scenario when updating our family home. We also swapped some rooms around and tackled a major… 2 9884 |