Chris Hughes
Member
- Joined
- Mar 15, 2008
- Messages
- 572
One of my customers came to me with a challenge recently. In our very tight housing market we had to come up with a budget minded solution to remove the out dated kitchen that existed from the "things to redo" column when home buyers looked at their house.
The easy answers were appliances and counter tops but that still left us with the 1980's oak kitchen that was obviously a kichen designed as a spec by some guy on a napkin. (no offense meant to any guys still designing kitchens on napkins for specs)
While flipping through one of my "ideas" books my customer came up with the picture of beaded lower cabinets while leaving the existing faces alone. I really liked the idea as it had a dramatic effect on the exist space with very little impact on the rest of the house as far dust and debris.
I was wrapping up the beaded portion and the installation of the few cabinets that had to be modified for the new appliances when my costumer came to me again. I should have taken the idea book away. We were looking for a backsplash, I was leaning hard on using glass instead of tile or granite, when my customer showed me a beaded wood backsplash picture. I was not keen to the idea first because I would not think that wood with that much detail would be easy to keep clean or maintained, not to mention the mess that I would have on my hands to channel into the existing plaster wall to embed structure to attach a vertical wood slat.
In the end, I though about the problems and came up with ideas and solutions to try to give my customer what they wanted while being sound in design and application. As I thought about all of the detail that would have to be kept clean and how difficult that might be, I realized that the random mosaic glass backsplash I recently installed had many more lines of groat to maintain. So that to me became a non issue. The next big issue to solve was the attachment of the material to the substrate without creating all of the dust by cutting the plaster to install horizontal battens to nail the wooden slats to. The beaded material was 5/8" thick and I needed to keep it as tight to the plaster as possible to not have issues with trim later. I decided that if I cut a channel on the backside of the beaded material that corresponded with a batten that could be nailed and glued to the wall I could get away with not cutting into the plaster.
The easy answers were appliances and counter tops but that still left us with the 1980's oak kitchen that was obviously a kichen designed as a spec by some guy on a napkin. (no offense meant to any guys still designing kitchens on napkins for specs)
While flipping through one of my "ideas" books my customer came up with the picture of beaded lower cabinets while leaving the existing faces alone. I really liked the idea as it had a dramatic effect on the exist space with very little impact on the rest of the house as far dust and debris.
I was wrapping up the beaded portion and the installation of the few cabinets that had to be modified for the new appliances when my costumer came to me again. I should have taken the idea book away. We were looking for a backsplash, I was leaning hard on using glass instead of tile or granite, when my customer showed me a beaded wood backsplash picture. I was not keen to the idea first because I would not think that wood with that much detail would be easy to keep clean or maintained, not to mention the mess that I would have on my hands to channel into the existing plaster wall to embed structure to attach a vertical wood slat.
In the end, I though about the problems and came up with ideas and solutions to try to give my customer what they wanted while being sound in design and application. As I thought about all of the detail that would have to be kept clean and how difficult that might be, I realized that the random mosaic glass backsplash I recently installed had many more lines of groat to maintain. So that to me became a non issue. The next big issue to solve was the attachment of the material to the substrate without creating all of the dust by cutting the plaster to install horizontal battens to nail the wooden slats to. The beaded material was 5/8" thick and I needed to keep it as tight to the plaster as possible to not have issues with trim later. I decided that if I cut a channel on the backside of the beaded material that corresponded with a batten that could be nailed and glued to the wall I could get away with not cutting into the plaster.
