As most of you know, we just finished a four month remodel of most of our home. Obviously as a Food Blogger, the kitchen and the kitchen appliances were among my top priorities. We wanted to transform our kitchen into a an efficient use of space that fit our needs and had as much functionality as possible. We went through numerous designs and debated the many different ways to achieve that. A few key issues that that we had to address:
Double Ovens
With all the baking that I do, from day one I said we had to have double ovens. It would finally allow me to be baking multiple things at multiple temperatures all at once. The problem was that no matter how we designed the kitchen, there was just no room to fit a wall oven unit with the two full size ovens. Then we explored having multiple units under the counter level and just couldn’t sacrifice the space there either.
Gas Range
I grew up cooking on a gas stove but since we’ve been married it’s all been electric. I have to admit, there is something nice about cooking on glass top electric stove for the ease of cleaning but I knew I wanted a gas range in the new house. We were already tearing up the flooring and would have easy access and we also wanted to add a gas line for a fireplace in the living room so it was cheaper to add a second line at the same time any way.
Wishes vs. Needs
Everything in this remodel was always balanced between what do we really want to have and what is going to be the best for resale value. We knew this wasn’t going to be our dream home or dream kitchen but we wanted to make sure it was comfortable for us and would be what we wanted in a kitchen for the next few years until we sold the house. Honestly I think we both did a great job of always trying to balance that and questioning ourselves if we could do something less expensive but still a great value. Our appliances also had to fit that model. As much as I would have loved to replace everything with high end appliances that I could drool over every night, we already had a decent fridge and a good dishwasher so we chose to keep those and replace the other units with things that would match our existing item