Most evenings last summer Mark Bubert and Joe Commendatore, next-door neighbors in Mountain View’s Gemello area, could be found barbecuing on their back patios. Neither had a functioning kitchen, so they’d cobble together meals and compare notes on their projects.
Bubert, a butcher with Dittmer’s Gourmet Meats in Mountain View, had lived in his mid-’50s tract home since 2002 but had never fully enjoyed the kitchen.
“My oven didn’t work for years,” he says.
And the galley-like kitchen with a wall separating it from the dining room simply didn’t work for the garrulous Bubert.
“I love to talk, and I work with the food industry, but there was no way I could talk while cooking,” he says.
He started upgrading his kitchen by stockpiling new stainless-steel appliances: a four-burner Thermador cooktop, range and dishwasher, Bosch double-door refrigerator and a Vent-A-Hood range hood.
Then he started thinking about what he really wanted in his new kitchen: more storage space, better lighting and access to the dining room.
His first choice was cherry cabinets, interior-lit with glass fronts on the uppers. Then his fianc chose rainforest green polished marble for the counter tops and a green rustic slate tile for the floor. The backsplash coordinates in pale green, glass squares.
“If it was me, it’d be all beige and black,” Bubert says.
Storage is enhanced with pull-out recycle bins and spice rack, as well as a drop-down iPod holder with a kitchen timer and a lazy Susan that gives him access to a deep corner.
Although Bubert worked without a designer, he did spend a lot of time at Home & Garden shows, looking for gadgets and ideas. Among his favorites is a spigot over the cooktop and instant hot water for making coffee with his French press.
“I’ve got twice as much storage space now,” he says. He also gained a few inches of space by replacing his plaster walls with drywall.
While he was at it, he replaced the old popcorn ceilings in the living room with drywall and changed out a sliding door for an arch.
Pleased as punch with the outcome, Bubert wouldn’t change a thing. “It came out better than I expected,” he says, not long after inviting his neighbors over to enjoy.
Bubert’s neighbor Commendatore and his wife, Sonia, were also living with a 1950s kitchen since 1999. But after their daughter came along last year, they gave some serious thought to bringing it into the 21st century.
The Commendatores also have a home in Tahoe. While deciding where they would ultimately live, they figured they’d need a “more presentable kitchen” before they could consider selling the house.
And their odd-sized oven died.
Commendatore says their goal was to “get as much value for the least invested,” which meant he served as his own general contractor and did his own demolition — including removing floors, counter tops and stripping wallpaper.
Beginning a year ago, he replaced the appliances, meeting the size requirements with a new GE oven and gas cooktop, microwave, side-by-side refrigerator and a KitchenAid dishwasher.
“We used the original boxes for 99 percent (of the cabinets),” he says, hiring a cabinet-maker to create new soft-close drawers and doors. He figures it would have cost $7,000 to replace the cabinets completely, and he paid $2,200 for the new drawers and doors.
A window over the sink was closed up. Today one looks at a tile pattern while working at the double stainless-steel sink.
After researching in stores mainly in Santa Clara, he chose absolute-black, honed granite for the counter tops and white subway tiles for the backsplash. The floors are large, mottled brown Italian limestone tiles, set in a herringbone pattern.
Lighting in both the kitchen and the living/dining areas was updated with recessed cams.
The couple drew a lot on friends in the trades, who moonlighted on their small job, charging them for time and materials. That tended to stretch out the length of the job. While his neighbor completed his project in about eight weeks, the Commendatores’ kitchen took more than twice that.
Commendatore says he saw the kitchen remodel as a learning experience, since he and his wife plan to build a house in Tahoe. He estimates it took him four solid days to do the demolition and probably 40 hours of research to identify appliances and materials.
In the end, he says they “created a kitchen that people would enjoy working in.
“If we were staying here forever, we might have done something different,” with a bigger budget, Commendatore says. But, he says, “We went a long way with it.”
Kitchen No. 1:
<a href="http://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/show_story.php?id=20543tag:news.google.com,2005:cluster=http://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/show_story.php?id=20543Wed, 06 Apr 2011 18:38:35 GMT 00:00″>Two kitchens, two goals
I just got a new kitchenaid mixer for xmas and I tried making spritz cookies and the dough was too thick to go through the press that I have. I have made the same recipe using my hand mixer and the cookies came out beautiful, but using the hand mixer overheated and almost blew up. Please help.
Hello. I’ve been scouring the web for quite a bit and have been unsuccessful in deternining which kitchenaid product is newer between the following:
I cant seem to find the little cookbook that came with my kitchenaid when i bought it. However there was a wonderful recipe for white bread in it (the mixer is about 9 years old i believe) and i was wondering if anyone could provide that recipe for me or has a link to the recipe