As requested by Michael Kellough after seeing it in the background of my other post, here are pictures of the kitchen in our straw bale house.
There is (was?) a local store that imports handmade furniture from Mexico. We liked the look of some of it and thought it would go better in the mission style look of our house compared to regular cabinets, but everything tended to be in 6' lengths. We also wanted one cabinet made deeper so it could house/conceal the double ovens. The owner of the store was willing to work with the builders to get custom dimensions for the much larger cabinets.
The only issue we had was a bit of "lost in translation" requests. I asked for the island and stove cabinet to both be 10' long..... they came in at 9'6" and 10'6".... guess they must have thought I meant "20 feet total"! The drawers on the island, although they had 3 feet to work with, are only 12" deep! That is still on my "list" to fix after 9 years.... I'm gonna have to get creative on removing the back panels and providing drawer guide support.
I made it work. Biggest issue was fitting it against a very non-straight straw bale wall. Tiling was fun too.
Getting that 5 x 10 island (one piece!) through the french doors *sideways* was a lot of fun... had to hire some local movers.
I actually made the range hood myself, inspired by one I'd seen in Fine Homebuilding years ago. They wanted 5K to make me one to match, which I thought was ridiculous for pounded sheet metal, so I ended up just using doug fir framing lumber, and had the neighbors son tack weld the clavos (nail) heads onto the metal. Then a special patina called "leave it behind the barn for a year while I build the house", and a top coat of poly.
In case you're wondering how we make do with no "uppers", the frosted door conceals an 8' x 10' walk in pantry.
Counters are poured in place concrete, ground smooth with diamond wheels. The sink is "reconstituted granite", with the counter literally poured around it (made a foam knockout to form the nice edges).... not my best decision in retrospect. Good thing it's tough.....
Total cost was about 10K IIRC.
There is (was?) a local store that imports handmade furniture from Mexico. We liked the look of some of it and thought it would go better in the mission style look of our house compared to regular cabinets, but everything tended to be in 6' lengths. We also wanted one cabinet made deeper so it could house/conceal the double ovens. The owner of the store was willing to work with the builders to get custom dimensions for the much larger cabinets.
The only issue we had was a bit of "lost in translation" requests. I asked for the island and stove cabinet to both be 10' long..... they came in at 9'6" and 10'6".... guess they must have thought I meant "20 feet total"! The drawers on the island, although they had 3 feet to work with, are only 12" deep! That is still on my "list" to fix after 9 years.... I'm gonna have to get creative on removing the back panels and providing drawer guide support.
I made it work. Biggest issue was fitting it against a very non-straight straw bale wall. Tiling was fun too.
Getting that 5 x 10 island (one piece!) through the french doors *sideways* was a lot of fun... had to hire some local movers.
I actually made the range hood myself, inspired by one I'd seen in Fine Homebuilding years ago. They wanted 5K to make me one to match, which I thought was ridiculous for pounded sheet metal, so I ended up just using doug fir framing lumber, and had the neighbors son tack weld the clavos (nail) heads onto the metal. Then a special patina called "leave it behind the barn for a year while I build the house", and a top coat of poly.
In case you're wondering how we make do with no "uppers", the frosted door conceals an 8' x 10' walk in pantry.
Counters are poured in place concrete, ground smooth with diamond wheels. The sink is "reconstituted granite", with the counter literally poured around it (made a foam knockout to form the nice edges).... not my best decision in retrospect. Good thing it's tough.....
Total cost was about 10K IIRC.
