Small Remodel – Making my Kitchen Closet Bigger

A small remodel: making my kitchen closet bigger and still getting a bigger kitchen! Back when I first considered getting a pellet stove a thought occurred to me that made me EXTREMELY excited. I realized that I may not need to put my pellet stove where my wood stove was! And, it turned out, I was right! I was able to abandon my chimney and put my pellet stove exactly where I wanted it instead of dead center in my kitchen where my hideous wood stove was.

(Hey all, so begins my series of blog posts chronicling all the steps it took me to remodel and complete my kitchen this last winter! YAY!)

With the help of some friends and the rental of a heavy duty appliance dolly last year my old wood stove headed out. (There was major rejoicing!) It was what made it even possible to make my kitchen closet bigger!

My first thought was that I could at least move my kitchen closet door to where the wood stove used to be. That would give me four feet right there of new wall space beside my cook stove.

Then I realized I might as well make my kitchen closet a bit deeper as well – at least to the bump out to the doorway to my living room.

Because the bump out was already there (not to mention the ginormous wood stove) I could add all this space in my closet without making my kitchen feel any smaller at all!

With tape measure in hand I was totally stoked to realize that with the door gone and the closet under my stairs made a bit deeper I would literally be gaining over five feet of wall space!

At first I thought about building more lower and upper cabinets…

But then my focus turned to the gorgeous old hutch my grandparents’ made some thirty years ago. Its awesome, its beautiful and its really too far away from my ice maker considering that I keep all of my booze in it.

(Priorities, you know…)

A few more measurements later and I couldn’t believe it, with the changes of making my kitchen closet bigger I suddenly had a perfect place in my kitchen for my grandparents’ hutch!

I got to work by first taking out the “wood shed” door.

This is one very weird wall!

I totally hate the soffit I built years ago to cover the upstairs plumbing and there is NOTHING I can do about it. My first decision was to figure out if I wanted to continue the soffit or if that would make everything even weirder.

Removing the steel, the cement board and then the wall behind it made my decision for me. Half the soffit came down with it revealing to me that it actually didn’t need to be near as big as it was!

This created WAY more work for me then if I had just saved the finished soffit but I don’t care: this is better.

(Yes even after going up and down my basement stairs a million times to cut all those 1xs I am still much happier with this outcome, it means my kitchen closet looks so much better I think!)

I built my wall flush with the post and covered it all with sheet rock, finally enclosing my new bigger closet.

I hung my “wood shed” door that I built out of a window screen years ago. And then I took my time trimming everything out and using LOTS of wood puddy.

Someday I plan on taking my chimney out completely but, for now, I stuffed a bunch of fiberglass insulation in the hole on the side of it and plan on pretending its not there. (Its inside the kitchen closet anyway so its not like I’m going to be looking at it very often.)

(I had the chimney sealed on the roof last summer – the thought of a squirrel (or something bigger…) crawling down it in the middle of the night did not appeal to me. Not to mention the heat loss!)

This was the first step to truly eliminating my wood stove and the decisions I was forced to make in my home to accommodate it. You can see from the bare wood spot on the floor that making the kitchen closet bigger still doesn’t encroach on the room as much as the stove did, I am so totally THRILLED.

And I’m very tired lol.

Next up I’m planning on staining my floors and fixing them. Normally I would wait longer with the floors but I happened to also be in the middle of the work on my brand new entryway while I was doing this. I had finally gotten to the point where it was time to paint in the other room so I wanted to get everything really nasty out of the way first.

Case and Point: Sanding down the floor where the patches were and totally covering my house with saw dust and dirt!

From there I’m also going to be adding some fancy storage to my lower cabinets. I’m going to replace the barn wood shelf above my sink with two smaller shelves using fancy brackets and then I’ll be on to finally painting the entire room.

I still cannot believe how much smoke damage I have and how filthy everything is!

One room at a time though I am finally getting rid of all the black soot and problems that horrible wood stove caused!