Lexington, KY - When the Barham family first moved into their new home in the Lansdowne subdivision in 2003, they gave the house the normal cosmetic reworking: tear down some wallpaper, a little painting, minor bathroom alterations. They knew the cramped, outdated kitchen and adjacent dining room would need more than a minor facelift, as would the large back room overlooking the family's ample back lawn, but they weren't resolute about what the final product should look like. So they waited.
"We didn't know what we wanted, so we didn't want to put a lot of money into it," Susan Barham said. "We said we wanted to live here awhile."
They waited nearly six years before a plan was finalized and work began in April of 2009, but it wasn't for a lack of trying. The Barhams enlisted the service of a couple of architects in town to help formulate a vision for how their space could be enhanced, but none of the suggestions were in keeping with the family's wants.
"They all just had a cookie-cutter vision: enlarging the footprint," Dan Barham said. "We like our visual of the outdoors so much, we didn't want to cannibalize our yard."
By chance, a nearby household recently had their kitchen redone, and Dan asked if he could come over for a gander. He liked what he saw. "It really looked nice, and I'm very particular," he said. "I know my preferences."
The neighbor gave Dan the contact information for the person who oversaw the work, and soon Doug Werne of Werne Contracting visited the Barhams for a consultation. Working with interior designer Deborah Drury, ASID, a broad vision for the home's transition materialized which encompassed not only the kitchen, back room and dining room, but also the front living room and entryway.
Originally, the Barhams thought the roofed breezeway off the back room would be enveloped into the already large room, but Werne suggested, instead of removing an exterior wall, enclosing the outside space, creating a long, narrow mudroom with a large wall peering into the back room and creative storage space for coats and shoes.
"This is a lot more functional than if we would have just added the extra space," Susan said. "It would have been a longer room, but it wouldn't have functioned well at all."
While the new mudroom was well received, the addition made the kitchen a completely interior room -
"like a cave," Susan said -
and soon talk turned to the tiny dining room. Specifically, could the family sacrifice this traditional room to accommodate a larger kitchen?
"I'm from colonial Virginia, every house has got to have a dining room," Dan said, referring to his initial reaction to the suggestion. But after a larger table was added to the back room, he was able to reconcile the fact that the home didn't have an exclusive dining room. "I don't have any problem having a nice Thanksgiving dinner in there," he said.
With a copious amount of space to work with, the kitchen could now assume an entirely new personality. With cues from Debra Hupman at Creative Kitchen & Bath, walls of cabinetry, utilizing innovative storage features, were installed around new kitchen appliances. (A similar plan was utilized in the back room, where a computer work station can be hidden behind a wall of cabinetry and bookshelves). Drury worked with Susan as she selected a figured "Revelation" granite slab, which was fabricated by Paul Jenkins of Top Service, for the countertops to accompany a chocolate-colored, weathered subway tile backsplash, and designed a shaped dining table top overlaid on top of the island for an informal eating area.
Once the construction work, which also included new and refinished hardwood floors, was complete, new furniture, reframed artwork and color motifs were selected to compliment the newly remodeled rooms.
Though the project was a long time in the making, Dan and Susan Barham emphatically concur that their thoughtful, often meticulous, consideration toward every aspect of the project, including with whom they decided to work, was the most important factor in their home's successful metamorphosis.
"What's made us happy with this remodel job is that this may have taken us a couple of years to go through all the little details," Dan said, "but we ended up being much more satisfied with the finished product."