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Lexington, KY - Marci and Chris Casey had lived in their Kenwick bungalow home for nearly 15 years before they finally decided to do something about the stifling kitchen. Even with one person behind the stove, Marci said, it was cramped –– the first order of any renovation was going to be added surface area.
“If I wanted to cook anything, I would have to put a card table up. It was a nightmare,” she said. “It was miserable to cook, because there was no space to do anything. So I just wanted as much counter space as possible.”
Along with more counter space, Marci and Chris had a few other requests they wanted to incorporate: an adjacent pantry and an island. They invited a few designers to take a look, but no one was able to accommodate the homeowners’ wishes given the way the kitchen was situated.
Tom Shirley, with Cabinets & Designs, however, came up with an agreeable solution –– it just required flipping the kitchen’s orientation and usurping an adjacent mudroom off the back of the house by removing the wall that separated the two rooms.
Last June the Casey’s kitchen was completely gutted, all the way to the studded floor. By mid-August, their kitchen was completely re-realized –– a new strand bamboo floor, new appliances, a deep single-bowl sink looking out into the deep backyard, new cherry Brookhaven cabinets, and ample granite countertops.
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In the middle of the room, an impressive granite-topped island has become the hub of kitchen activity.
“I wasn’t going to go with all granite, but I really like it now,” Marci said. “I was kind of surprised, I do everything here. I do my food prep. The kids eat here, they do their homework here. I love this. They tried to talk me out of having so many electrical outlets (on the island), but I use all of them all the time.”
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The couple was deliberate in expressing the style they wanted for the new kitchen: sharp, but not showy; modern, but not cold. The crisp design of the wood cabinets were an ideal match.
“We just wanted something simple with clean lines. A lot of designs have these big moldings and corbels, we didn’t want anything like that. That’s one thing I kept telling them: plain, the least amount of frills as possible,” Marci said. “We wanted to keep everything smooth and flat, which was kind of driving them all crazy.”
The modest nature of the cabinets and the rest of the kitchen also helps embellish Chris’ contributions to the space. As a co-owner with Ironhorse Forge, a Lexington artisan metalworking studio, Chris handmade dozens of rustic iron pieces, such as handles for the drawers, knobs for the cabinets and brackets for the new island.
“I wanted to make something that complemented the simplicity of the kitchen’s new design that didn’t stand out too much against the cabinets themselves,” he said. “I’ve done jobs for other customers through our business, we do a variety of metal work, but when it came to this stuff, I was looking to make something simple.”
While Marci and Chris and their children are enjoying the new kitchen space, they are left to wonder one question: why it took them so long to get it done.
“We put it off for several years. We kept thinking that maybe we could save money doing it ourselves, piecing it together ourselves,” Marci said. “But I’m glad we didn’t, because it would have been much harder.”http://chevychaser.com/