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9780345449887
Chapter 1 A Design in Mind Which would you prefer-a lifestyle that suits your kitchen, or a kitchen that suits your lifestyle? A few years ago, an acquaintance of mine named Phil bought a modest 1960s ranch in Los Angeles and tried to update it by adding the most lavish kitchen he could imagine. "I heard it's the number one way to increase the value of a home," he said. "Anything that I spend here, I'll double when I go to sell." Phil's spend-anything approach, however, quickly got him into trouble. He knocked out one wall and built a giant glass lean-to for the breakfast table, the kind you now see at every Burger King. This "bigger is better" approach led to a room that measures about 30 feet from one end to the other, and is done entirely in white. If you stand at one end of the kitchen, you literally have to call out loud to be heard at the other end. Rather than a kitchen, it looks more like something from the bridge of Star Trek's Enterprise. The price tag also had an element of science fiction to it: $95,000. Worse still, when he tried to sell the place eight years after this misguided renovation, the real estate agent told him something a homeowner dreads most of all. "I'm still in shock," Phil said with a sputter on the telephone. "She told me the kitchen was dated." Now, a lot of things can go wrong with a house. You can discover the entire structure has been eaten by termites, for instance, or find you're located on the right-of-way for a new highway. But worse than either of these would be to spend $95,000 on a kitchen, only to have it turn sour as old milk before a decade is out. Yet this is a risk we homeowners face. Our houses have gotten larger and larger over the years, but rather than spreading out our various activities through the whole house, we seem to concentrate them in the kitchen. There's no more dynamic, essential room in any home. Naturally, there is a tendency to overdo things, to somehow attempt to create a kitchen that tries to live up to someone else's fantasy of what the room should be, rather than living up to your own unique needs, wishes, and quirks. Instead, I think the goal should be to create a room that suits your needs and gives you comfort and convenience every day you live in your home. By its very functionality, rather than its show-off attempt at style, your kitchen will become a selling point when you choose to move. Designers offer a thousand rules about how to attain this and about what a kitchen should be, in terms of layout and measurements. While some of this is helpful as a guide, I prefer to think of it as just that: a guide. Instead, your kitchen should emerge as a product of your own vision, the realities of your own lifestyle, and the even starker constraints of your own budget. Sure, adding a lavish kitchen often makes good financial sense in terms of the long-term value of your house-as long as you don't go overboard. Yet even if you don't have the $40,000 to $70,000 you would need to do a total renovation, you can benefit from following the same steps during a far more modest makeover. Let's start with the basics of design, which will help you no matter how modest or lavish your plans might be. A Place to Start If designing a kitchen involved nothing more than figuring out where the cabinets should go and chucking a counter on top, everybody's job would be easy. Especially mine. There's much more to it than this, however-which will still come as a surprise to many builders and do-it-yourselfers across the country who opt for shortcuts. Doing a kitchen right involves paying attention to a few basic elements. To me, the most important element of a kitchen, like the most important element in real estate, is location-and in a kitchen, good location has everything to do with good lighting. If you're lucky enough to be able to choose exactly where you can locate tManfredini, Lou is the author of 'Lou Manfredini's Kitchen Smarts How to Renovate, Repair, and Maintain the Most-Used Room in Your House', published 2004 under ISBN 9780345449887 and ISBN 0345449886.
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