It’s an exciting and overwhelming time all rolled into one! AKA the start of the One Room Challenge, and we’re tackling the kitchen at our rental renovation (a huge project!). Today I’m going to share some background information, current photos, the plans for the basement kitchen layout and even a video that recaps our “progress” for this week.
Welcome all :)
My name is Nicole and I live up in Northern Ontario, Canada! We bought a second house in April that’s close to where the Husband works but we’ve still kept our main/regular house (which is located about 2 hours away). Our plan is to freshen up the upstairs, completely renovate the basement to create a second unit/apartment, and live there part-time while we rent the top half.
We completed demolition and uncovered some foundation issues, and have started a bit of the rebuild process and are currently waiting for some plumbing work, HVAC work, inspections and pretty much the rest of the rebuild (including insulation, drywall, floors, etc.).
This is definitely the BIGGEST renovation we’ve tackled to date, but I’m hoping the deadlines for the One Room Challenge will help push us into completing the kitchen (and pretty much the rest of the apartment at the same time!). This isn’t my first ORC rodeo, and I know that we’re starting at a bit of a disadvantage by not having an actual “room” to start work.
Our past One Room Challenge projects:
Ready to see some photos of where we’re at?
This is the entrance to the kitchen from the living/dining room (just before we had the electrical work done). You can read about the apartment layout and framing to see what the rest of the space looks like, but we’ve not really gotten anything done since then.
While I was originally hoping to have the kitchen open into the dining room (with cute built-in seating), we uncovered a concrete wing wall that can’t be moved. I’m gaining a few extra feet in the long cabinet run, but losing some narrow cabinets I wanted on the opposite wall.
Basically, the kitchen is a narrow space, and I was thinking that I could squeeze in some skinny cabinets near the fridge (on the wall that blocks the furnace – the dark grey block in the layout above). But with the wing wall, we’re losing some walking space so I’ve removed those in favour of a better walkway through to the bedrooms/bathroom (see the final layout below).
As I was mentioning, the kitchen is kind of the dividing element of the apartment, separating the entry/living/dining room from the 2 bedrooms and bathroom. Unfortunately, the furnace is located right in the middle of the unit, and we had to work around that.
Basement Kitchen Layout
Here is what I was thinking for the layout:
Essentially, we have an L-shape kitchen with a long run of cabinets along the long outside wall, then the fridge is on the opposite side (tucked near the furnace wall) with some cabinets there. I’m thinking those will act like a linen closet for the bathroom (since I lost some space compared to my original idea). I was originally hoping to have a tall cabinet instead, but found out the electrical code here states that the switch for the bathroom can’t be within 1m of the shower stall, so it has to be on the outside (aka where my cabinet was going to go…).
Here’s a little mockup showing what things should hopefully look like once we start to get this room built back up!
Anyways, check out this quick video for a bit more details and layout of the space:
(Little Élise was a little cranky when I was trying to film this, so that’s why she’s there with me!).
Next week I’m going to share the design details for the space so definitely come back and check those out! (Normally I like to do it the first week, but we’re still waiting on everything so aren’t going to have any progress to show for a while…).
Because ya, this is exactly what the room looks like right now and we can’t really install anything if there are no floors and walls :)
I hope you follow along with our renovation progress, and you can always follow me on Instagram to see some behind-the-scenes stuff too! Hopefully, by next week we have some more work to show, but at least you can see the design direction for the kitchen (I sort of showed a bit in the mockups). As I said, we have a LOT of work ahead of us :)
And don’t forget to check out all the One Room Challenge featured designers and linking participants (I’m in this group) because there are going to be a lot of great renovations happening in the next six weeks!
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