Rehabber’s Rehab

The permit process in Oak Park is a long and agonizing one. Sometimes it feels like you need a permit from the village to even look at your kitchen. I will say for the village that they are very helpful during the application process, because they want you to improve your home.

So in order to get a head start on things before we move in, Thor, Matt, and I met tonight to draw up plans and, well, make a plan. First project is definitely going to be kitchen remodel.

The Sunshine Nightmare

There are no appliances in there right now, and the whole thing looks like it came out of a lemony sunshine 70′s nightmare. But… how to do it? and how will this fit in with our long term goals for the house? and what are our long term goals?

Our thoughts right now are to redo the kitchen and bath, back porch, floors, paint, ect, and then evaluate where we’re at, either then creating some living space in the basement or adding on a second story. And right now it seems that every decision we make will affect how things turn out down the road.

Matt drew up some plans, and we got out our tracing paper–art hour for adults!! I was tempted to use crayons instead of pens.

I am a big fan of the more modern open floor plan, with flow between the living spaces, and then a separate private space. This would involve tearing down walls, and putting up new ones. Basically as much work as possible. Thor seems to want to do as little as possible to the floor plan while still revamping the space (not that I blame him since he will be doing most of the work). Matt is doing his best to mediate between the two of us. As the professional in the group his opinion generally holds more weight. He uses words like “dynamic” to describe asymmetries created in a room by moving walls around.

The possibilities seemed endless and overwhelming, I won’t go into the round and round.

Final decisions, at least enough to get going:

• Kitchen: blow out the pantry. Hold out on putting in a permanent central island, open up the kitchen to the sunroom with a peninsula, move door to backyard from basement stairs to sunroom. New cabinets, appliances, ect.
• Back porch: do a deck, and not screened in porch (I will only be denied for so long, though), and then a patio in the back yard. Room for porch swing and grill.
• Bathroom: blow out one wall and make it bigger. Put in bigger bath and double sinks.

Now we’ll see how much of it will actually happen