Navigation tips: Most of the links pop up photos. Click the pic! There are captions and buttons below some pics as warranted. An X in the corner will do what X's in corners do. If you do nothing else, please click the ***highlighted*** link near the bottom of the page! It's a captioned slide show with highlights from the whole project.
I wasn't planning on redoing the kitchen in 2025. Yeah, it was getting pretty ratty looking after 60 years - the plywood cabinet doors and drawer fronts were chipping in places, the finish was totally worn away around the knobs of the most-used cabinet doors, the top left door on the dining room side delaminated a number of years ago and hadn't closed all the way since, the speckles in the Formica countertop had been scrubbed away around the sink. Oh and the exhaust fan in the range hood was so gunked up that in cold weather it hummed ineffectually for a minute before finally spinning up, and streaks of grease ran down the wall from it when the area heated up. And one of the electric burners had exploded, also a number of years ago, and another one only went up to medium, and the last replacement elements had sold out ages ago. Same with the double oven - burned out heating elements forced me to consolidate the remaining working pair into the lower oven at least a decade ago.
Almost on a whim, back in January I decided to replace the stovetop. The new one is glass, with 2 induction sites and 2 thermal, one of which is quite large. This caused a problem though. The controls for the old stovetop were 4 banks of push-button switches - one for each burner - mounted in a chrome housing, which in turn was mounted in a fake drawer front, the last one on the right. Over the next few days, having this relic with loose wires dangling out the back into the cabinet below came to seem less and less acceptable. So I took it out, and that left a gaping hole in the fake drawer front so I took that out too. From that point on there was no turning back.
15 February: It took less than 2 weeks to re-face the drawers,
7 March: ...but those first 2 doors took me 3 weeks to get right! Learning curve...
21 March
6 April
15 May
5 June: The upper face plate is not flat. It was hard to get the double doors to align!
9 June
19 June: Annabeth helped me take down the greasy old range hood.
10 July: The area above the stove took WEEKS! Finally ready to move on.
17 July: The next section was much quicker. I even took the time to cut a piece of plexiglass to protect the bottom shelf from daily abrasion by the coffee can.
18 July: This is "all" that's left.
19 July: Ugh :-(
29 August: Ta da!
This is what we lived with for over 30 years. Actually no, it was worse, I added the bottom pull-out platform maybe 8 years ago. Before that the garbage can, and all the garbage that missed, sat on the floor below.
Ewww. This was 31 March. I had just started working on it. The cabinet frame had been painted and the pull-out platform removed. I had decided by that point to make a drawer, with a screened vent panel above it. The steel tabs were my first take on attaching the upper panel.
A day later, a layer deeper. I bought 10" heavy duty drawer glides, which matched the depth of the cabinet. I needed a wooden cross bar to attach them to at the rear, so some of that 100 year old steel-mesh-reinforced "mud" would have to be chipped and clipped away.
4 April. The crossbar is attached to the studs, the drawer frame is in place. New plywood lining is in place on the right side and lower rear of the cabinet, and the new front is ready to attach to the new drawer.
The top of the drawer is a piece of plywood with a cutout to accept the garbage can.
6 April. The vent panel is installed in the cabinet and the front is attached to the drawer,
...and everything is aligned when it's closed. Done! Well except I had to replace the drawer glides with a variant that hyperextends to 11", to have space to get the garbage can in and out.
Nice Bergen County kitchens built in the mid 1960s came with built-in cutting boards. This one was made of pine plywood. All I did with this at first was paint the face green to match the cabinets, with the intent of replacing the board itself when the mood struck me.
The mood struck in mid-April. It's all done in hardwoods, mostly maple and walnut. The board is made of alternating walnut and maple planks cut to random-ish widths, with a piece of cherry for variety. It's held to the front with a full-width dovetail joint. I built a jig for the router table to make sure the female dovetails were straight and centered. The notches in the push blocks are to avoid contact with the blade, which is a potential safety hazard.
This is a piece of walnut, about to get pushed through the cutting area.
Here's the result. This will slide over the male dovetail milled into the front piece.
It's finished with a blend of tung oil and lemon juice, and every couple of months I've been giving it a fresh coating.
The first time I saw the old beige vinyl baseboards against the new cabinet color, I knew they had to go. I was thinking of a deep green to match the "accent" paint color, but it was really hard to come by. The local Lowes has 120' spools in black, but I only needed about 35'. There were no good options.
So I photoshopped it green and sent it to the girls in early June via group chat. I didn't like it, and neither did they.
So I photoshopped it black. Bingo! It was unanimous.
I waited for pretty much everything else to be done before installing this. A finishing touch, along with the radiator cover.
It looks sharp!
9 June. I took this photo before the new cabinet doors were up in the previous section. I think they call this the Contemplation Stage, but it's a no-brainer - the range hood has to go!
A week later and gone it was! Annabeth was in town and helped me lower it once I'd gotten the electrical disconnected and the mounting screws out. Turns out they used a scrap piece of Formica for the transition between the backsplash and the hood. It was not suitable for re-use. For one thing, it wouldn't reach up all the way to the new hood, which is an inch or so more compact. For another thing, just yuck.
Unfortunately there was a hole behind it. The top hole is OK, that's where the vent goes. But not the bottom one.
This hole.
I put the new hood in. Gail helped me lift it into place. On about the third try everything was lined up correctly. I tightened down all the mounting screws.
It was time to deal with the hole. Step 1 was to square it off.
Next, cut a patch to the right size. There were a couple of bags of scrap drywall in the basement, left over from April. The patch needed a backstop, the original plaster and lath wall being a couple of inches away.
Patched, spackled and primed.
I put the tiles up over 4 July weekend. It was my first time installing tiles! First goes a layer of mastic, spread evenly with a big serrated trowel. The tiles go up ASAP before the mastic starts to dry, with spacers to maintain their separation. The next day, once the mastic has fully set up, the spacers come out and the grout goes in to fill the spaces.
The back of the unit, from a ladder on the driveway.
I slapped the venting components together to make it usable, but the path wasn't straight. Apparently the old vent was off center by maybe an inch. I went back in September to widen the opening in the bricks to get a straight path.
The old radiator cover, built and installed c1964. The Formica-covered top slab was removable to provide grudging access to the bleed valve. They thoughtfully attached a piece of the same trim that runs along the top of the upper cabinets, which came in handy.
The lid was a chunk of wood an inch thick. The installers notched out the corner where it overlapped the door trim. Unfortunately they also notched out the door trim.
I cleaned the wound,
...made a patch from a piece of supposedly identical door trim salvaged from around the basement door,
...fit it, sanded it in and painted the trim around this doorway and the one to the dining room white. The plug in the radiator (left side behind the bleed valve) would turn out to constrain the design of the new cover. There's not even 1/8" of space to the left of it, and I was not about to overlap the door trim with the new cover!
I built the new cover in the basement, re-using the screen from the old cover.
It definitely needed rigid support on the left side. This is what I came up with, to clear the upper and lower plugs on the end of the radiator.
Work Began on 1 February
First I built a new drawer to go where the old stove control used to be. I chose poplar for the drawer front since it was the easiest to work with of the hardwoods available at Benjamin Bros, a local-ish hardware store / lumber yard in Tenafly, NJ. Over the next couple of weeks I replaced the fronts on the 11 existing drawers to match. They were so easy! A few cuts with a router, a couple of holes for the handle, a couple of nails to attach it to the sides of the drawer.
Still to do: The double oven needs to be replaced, and so do the sink and countertops. I'm going to have to hire someone to take care of these. That's a 2026 project though, well beyond this year's budget.
Look! Old brochures! Old photos!
When Wendy and I moved into this house in 1991, there was a folder in a drawer in the kitchen with brochures and manuals for the kitchen appliances. They all date from the early-mid 1960s. The fonts and graphics scream it! The dishwasher manual has a zip code printed on the back - Chicago, Illinois 60684. Zip codes were introduced in the US on 1 July 1963, so it had to be installed after that. One of the panel phone brochures has a revision date of 7-63, and another one says 8/64. The ovens are controlled by means of a Dinner Dial. How 60's can you get! So it appears the kitchen was installed in late 1964, or maybe 1965. That made it about 25 years old when we moved in, an older remodel but still in very nice condition.
The first item to break down was the clock on the oven. I opened it up and got it working - twice - back in the 1990s, once for a few days, once for a few hours, before giving up on it. The singing refrigerator (the circulation fan motor made noise like a whale song starting before we moved in, just like the one in Haworth did after about 10 years of service), which we named George, started shrieking in 2009 and was quickly replaced. A couple years later we replaced the dishwasher, putting an end to the deafening noise it made and the occasional river running down towards the dining room. In 2015 we removed the drop ceiling, replacing it with drywall. This included the walls above the upper cabinets, and the hideous gold wallpaper. This was a big improvement, though with a couple of issues that got taken care of this year.
Finally, there were a couple of questionable choices made back in 1964 or 5, concerning the radiator cover and the area around the door to the basement, which I also corrected in 2025.
As I've mentioned elsewhere, in 2015 we hired a local contractor - the same guy who provided our bi-weekly cleaning service - to remove the 1960's dropped ceilings and replace them with drywall. This included replacing the walls above the upper cabinets in the main part of the room, which were drywall but they barely extended above the drop ceilings and wouldn't reach the new ceiling, and creating walls in the back where there were none. He also convinced me to replace the plywood paneling encasing where the framing for the stairs to the 2nd floor intrudes into the kitchen, above the basement door, on the grounds that trying to tie it into the new ceiling would look stupid. They did an OK job, and I really like the crown moulding to tie the walls and ceiling together in the main part of the kitchen. But one thing always bothered me - in the rear part of the kitchen the bottom edge of the drywall overhung the trim at the top of the cabinets. Like, what were they thinking? You're not supposed to see the edge of the drywall!
Besides all that, pretty much the whole kitchen was done in plywood paneling during the 1960s refurb, and it was getting pretty tired. So I hired a new contractor, a drywall specialist, to remove and replace the overhanging pieces of drywall at the back of the room, and the tired paneling around the refrigerator and the wall dividing the front and back of the room. I kept the paneling along one wall backing the stairs. Can of worms, that one.
They arrived on a Tuesday, 8 April. By that time I had finished the lower cabinets from the oven around to the basement door. They did the tearout that day, including temporarily taking down the one piece of crown molding along the dividing wall. All the new drywall was installed the next day. By mutual agreement they left me some sanding and spackling to do.
I did the remaining lower cabinets, the ones along the dining room wall, then interrupted the cabinet work to paint the walls and crown moulding. The Formica countertops protected the lower cabinets from drips and roller spray, but there's nothing to protect the uppers, and no point in risking paint drips from above onto finished work! I went with a mold-resistant white for the walls, and a deep primary green for the crown molding. The green looked awful against the remaining paneled walls, so I painted over the two affected pieces in semi-gloss white, which I carried forward to the trim around the two doorways. I used up some more of the deep green on the two window surrounds, but any more than that would have been too much.
SYNOPSIS: When they installed the kitchen c 1964 they messed up the transition between the basement door frame and the cabinet a few inches away, resulting in a wavy wall (not to mention the unevenness of the paneling encasing the underside of the stairs to the 2nd floor); when the contractor in 2015 encased the area above the door in sheet rock they drew attention to the waviness with carefully cut-and-pieced-together cove moulding that traced the uneven line (but they did get the drywall encasing nice and straight); the door itself was a cheap piece of junk and never hung right.
I'm pretty sure the wave in the wall was intentional. The 4" wide piece of panelling between the door jamb and the rear edge of the cabinet was flush with both, the problem being that the cabinet side stuck ¼" further into the room than the door jamb. To get it to be flush at both ends, they jammed a one-by-four into the gap, with a ¼" thick piece of door stop moulding nailed to the back of one edge so it would stick out further on one side. The 4" wide piece of panelling was directly attached to the one-by-four.
I took down all the cove moulding, the door trim and the 4" wide piece of cockeyed paneling a number of weeks beforehand, the intent being to size up the situation, so when it was time to get to work it looked like this. Off came the cabinet doors, off came the endplate of the cabinet, out came the one-by-four once I figured out that it was nailed to the door jamb. It butted directly on the wall stud (the same one the garbage drawer is mounted to), so all I had to do was remove the door stop moulding that made it stand crooked and put it back where it came from. Could have been a lot worse!
I was concerned that that the cabinet end plate was structural, to the point of propping up the shelves while it was in progress. It was ¾" thick, with notches routed out for the ends of the shelves. Turns out it wasn't important. I replaced it with a much thinner piece of plywood, that I cut to fit snugly around the stair encasing and reach all the way to the door jamb in one straight run. I filled in below it with 4" wide plywood and a corner moulding that reach to the floor. The old radiator cover had a long piece of the same trim that's used above the cabinets, so I cut a piece that reaches all the way from the corner of the cabinet to the stair encasing. And I put up new trim around the door. As of 27 July, all that was left to do was paint.
