So You Want to Remodel your Kitchen or Bath: Pt. 1

By daniingle

First, Let’s Start With How You Establish the Design

Throughout my career I’ve helped lots of clients through the always exciting, but never fun remodel process.  The exciting part is thinking about your new room, but the un-fun part is getting through a project while living in your home.  I’ve come up with some ideas that help move the work along while keeping you sane and focused on the end result.

This is my process:
1) Decide on a theme.  Do you want a fresh new look, or will your bath need to blend with the established style of your house?
2) Decide what you want to change, meaning, how do you want the room to function?
3) Gather all the magazine pictures and ideas you have and try to settle on one look.  Then start to build your design with that “look” in mind.
4) Design 101:  First let’s talk about focal points. A focal point can be a painting, or a piece of furniture, or a color scheme already established in a contiguous room.  That item or color becomes the focus which will steer you through the decisions.

Here’s a really good example.  Although this is an old room I designed, it’s such a perfect picture of using a piece of furniture as a focal point I had to use it.  The whole room was totally designed around the cabinet in the background.  It’s called a shrunk, which is a painted antique from Germany that my client owned.  The kitchen, nook, and family room were all designed with the colors from that focal piece of furniture.

However, sometimes there isn’t a direction of any kind.  That’s when I turn to my rulebook which says, “Whatever there is the least of becomes the first choice.”  What I mean is that there are millions of paint colors, and thousands of paintings or light fixtures or plumbing fittings (all things that will go in your room),  but the colors and patterns of granite are limited.  So I choose granite first.

The slab on the left has a nice amount of striated pattern.  I tend to prefer either no pattern, medium pattern like on left, or lots of pattern like the slab on the right.  This slab has so much personality that I used it for the counter top and the backsplash in a contemporary house. It looks like a river bed to me.

 

5) Next, select the tile to go with your granite.  If your granite is mostly solid, then you have the opportunity to pick a backsplash in a color that blends that has lots of pattern or style.

I have to be honest and say sometimes the tile drives the design.  During the years that we used a panel over the stove in the kitchen or in the shower of a bath, I fell in love with some specific ones which came in limited colors.  In that case, I let the tile drive the design and selected a granite to go with the tile.

Insert pics here.

To continue with this process, see my next blog:  So You Want to Remodel Your Kitchen or Bath—What’s Next After the Tile and Granite are Selected?