Furniture for the bath (Part 1)

Mid Continent Cabinetry has created a great vanity program designed to provide furniture quality cabinetry for the bath. They designed the program to offer the utmost in choice and flexibility. The Program includes:

• Bath vanities
• Tall storage cabinets
• Wall and mirror storage

Tales from a Kitchen Designer (Part 4)

Okay, a lot has happened in the past 12 days. I am not quite sure where to begin. I left off with us installing the cabinets. It only took 3 days total. Two days to set the cabinets and one day for us to install moldings, panels toe kicks and put all of the shelves, doors and drawers back in. That alone took several hours. All in all, everything went in pretty well, which is good since my wife was starting to get tired of the dust and is ready to be done. I was a little short on crown molding, and had missed a shelf on one of the base cabinets.

3 great cooking apps

Anyone that enjoys cooking has loads of cookbooks and recipe cards. Many of us even have a cabinet or two dedicated to storing our cookbook collection. But with the rise in smartphone use its definitely worth mentioning a few of the best cooking apps available. Here are our top three.

Is your refrigerator running? Let me check my computer and see.

We'll all be hearing a lot about "smart appliances" in 2011, and Control4 is just one of the companies interested in home automation. They have partnered with Sub-Zero and Wolf to make appliances more energy efficient and easier to program. While the system won't let you refrigerator order more milk just yet, it does offer some energy saving modes and worth while alerts that can easily be accessed by way of mobile devices or other computers.
The full press release is included below.

Tales from a Kitchen Designer (Part 3)

It’s amazing what can happen in a week. Last Friday the cabinets arrived, and boy did they. We had boxes everywhere. In the kitchen, dining room, living room, sun room. I almost put some in our boys rooms, but they wouldn’t be happy with that. I was able to get the kitchen painted prior to the cabinet delivery, and then again after they arrived. The color that was agreed upon turned out to be a little too blue for my wife. She was looking for a greener color and what was on the wall was not that. After a last minute review of the color chips we had, a new color was selected and by the end of the weekend, my painting was done, (at least everywhere cabinets touched), and a few of the cabinets were unboxed, and staged to be installed. My wife happily helped do a little of that, just so she could get a glimpse of her new cabinets.

Tales from a Kitchen Designer (Photos)

View photos of my kitchen remodel currently in progress. The most recent photos are at the top of the page.

Tales from a Kitchen Designer (Part 2)

Well, Valentines Day came early to our house. Last week our contractor called and asked if he could start our project sooner than we had planned. Originally he was to start on Monday, Feb 14th. That would allow us a week to clean and pack after the baby shower my wife was hosting. After talking to her, we decided why prolong the inevitable, so we decided that Monday Feb 7th would be D-Day. as soon as the party was over Saturday night, we frantically started packing up our kitchen. While plates, dishes and breakables were carefully wrapped and boxed, the kid’s plastic plates and Tupperware went flying.

Bubble Wrap: A Tale of 2 ladies.

About a year ago, I got a call from 2 nice ladies who said they had a client who wanteded her kitchen remodeled. They were referred to me from another client. This is the kind of call I love to get.

As it turns out, this was not what they do every day, but in fact they apparently often do just about anything their clients ask of them. Their names are Patti Beck and Mianna Harlepp. Their company name is “Bubble Wrap” which I thought was unusual for my industry, but we proceeded to meet and plan for the new cabinetry to be made.

Tales from a kitchen designer (Part 1)

T-25 days until work officially begins on remodeling our kitchen. Given that we have been in our house 9 years, my wife can hardly wait. While we have talked about it for years, the funds to actually proceed with the project as well as my urge to do it came to reality about six months ago when I made an innocent little comment. Something about “if we are going to spend X amount of money on the house, I’d put into the kitchen before I spent it on flagstone steps and landscaping.” That of course led to the question of how much will our kitchen cost? Well, four months and about a dozen designs later (yes it took that long to figure out my own kitchen) we finally had a plan and idea that we both love, and it fits into the price range we could afford. About mid December the cabinet order was placed, and on January the 4th, the cabinets went into production. Since that time, my wife has done holiday baking, birthday cakes and treats for our two young sons, and we entertained her family for Christmas, (as a fitting send off, my brother-in-law cooked a fabulous Prime Rib in our old and aging Hot Point oven) and at every step she was imagining where things would be in the new space.

A Fresh Start (Part 2)

We are well into 2011, and despite my attempt at getting my new craft room finished for the New Year, we are pitifully behind schedule. All of the pieces of cabinetry I had designed for the room has not yet arrived. (The Winter Holiday is the time for cabinet factories to shut down completely and for all the employees to take deserved vacation time.) I still have yet to get the wallpaper border removed. The Christmas decorations have been taken down and tossed in there and the door closed to keep the cats out. Oh well.