Kitchen After: The Movie

After being blown away by my directorial debut, Kathy asked to see footage of the finished kitchen and upstairs bathroom. I had to shoot this one several times. There were script problems from day-one. The caterer never showed up and so the Best Boy and Key Grip walked off the set. Everyone knows you can’t shoot a film without a topnotch Best Boy and Key Grip. Bunch of prima donnas.

I did shoot this one three times because it was coming out too long. The first one was 6-minuets long, which makes for a huge upload. I don’t know if anyone’s noticed this about me, but I can be long-winded at times. I thought about just shooting 6-minutes and then cleaning it up in post-production, but I don’t have a post-production department, so that wasn’t going to happen. I was aiming for 2 minuets, but I settled on 3. It still seems rushed to me.

Some things about the kitchen: First, it’s still not complete. I mention how I’m moving the fridge eventually. This whole back of the house is like one big puzzle and some items are not in their proper place at this point. The fridge is one of them. I also want to put towel racks on either side of the island but after looking and looking I couldn’t find anything I liked and then sort of forgot about it altogether. Shooting the video made me think of this again, so the hunt is on once more. Also, the cast iron stove is about a foot too close to the wall. It needs to come out, and insulated metal panels, like tin ceiling panels, will go behind it in front of the beadboard. This is low priority since the chimneys are chopped off in the attic at this point.

The one thing I would call a design flaw with the kitchen is the space between the stove and the wall where you would pass to go in to the alcove where the fridge will eventually be. On paper this seemed bigger, but in reality it is tighter than I would like it to be. It’s not a serious issue, though. If someone is standing in front of the stove cooking and someone needs to get to the fridge, someone might need to step aside a little. So long as it doesn’t come to blows, it shouldn’t be a big deal. It’s not like 3 people are racing to the fridge at one time.

Others might think the lack of cabinets and counters are a big design flaw. Well, I won’t make excuses for the kitchen. I love it the way it is. I just didn’t see a point in putting in acres of cabinets and counters that seemed unnecessary to me. In my last house the POs put in crappy cabinets and counters but they put in a ton of them. Every wall in what was a moderately sized kitchen was lined with cabinets and counters. I lived in the house for 3 years and never had anything in more than half of them. I swore I wouldn’t do that in this house.

So, here’s the kitchen. For newer readers of the blog, the kitchen was what I worked on and blogged about for the first year or so of the blog. It wasn’t exactly a gut-remodel, but it was very, very extensive.