In which we got stuck with — and to — the wrong cabinets, and poured concrete in our house on purpose
The kitchen is where you spend most of your waking life in a house. Jennifer did the layout and it works — the flow is right, the dining area sits just off the kitchen where you can see into it without being in it, and the whole thing makes sense in a way that I can’t take credit for because she designed it. So let’s start there and work our way down.
The flooring was never a question. Same heart pine as the rest of the house, 12-inch wide cottage grade, face nailed, radiant heat underneath. Warm, consistent, looks like it belongs. Done.
Everything else took more work to get wrong.
We’d been trying to source cabinets through DirectBuy, the members-only buying club that got you access to manufacturer pricing. Jennifer knew exactly what she wanted: inset doors. That’s where the door sits flush inside the face frame, the frame visible all around it, the whole thing reading like a piece of furniture rather than a kitchen cabinet. It’s a more traditional, more refined look, and Jennifer had been specifying exactly that level of detail for high-end clients her entire career. I was looking at the same photos online and thinking they all looked basically the same.
We weren’t hearing back from DirectBuy on pricing. A friend of mine had just finished his mother-in-law’s house using a local guy — small operation, worked out of his house, ordered direct from a cabinet factory. Reasonable prices, manageable lead times. I was impatient and we were burning money on the construction loan every day, so I put in a deposit.
A day or two later DirectBuy came back. Good price, good cabinets, inset doors — what we actually wanted. I called the local guy to cancel.
He wouldn’t give me my money back. Factory already started the order, he said. Maybe true, maybe not, but he had my deposit and he had leverage and that was that. We were getting overlay doors — the kind that sit on top of the face frame rather than flush inside it. Standard. Fine. Not what Jennifer wanted.
The cabinets are solid wood, which is something. They’re not bad. But I look at those doors every day and I know what they should have been. Two more days of patience and we’d have gotten there. Jennifer was right. She usually is.
The one thing that redeems the uppers is her idea — chicken wire glass in the door panels. That old pebbled safety glass with the wire embedded in it, the kind you see in old factory doors and institutional buildings. Light comes through but you can’t really see in. It looks period-appropriate, it looks considered, and it cost almost nothing relative to what it gives the room. That one I’d keep exactly as is.
For the island Jennifer went to Brimfield. If you don’t know it, Brimfield is a massive antique flea market in Massachusetts that runs three times a year — acres of dealers, the real stuff mixed in with the junk, and you have to know what you’re looking for. Jennifer did, because the firm she’d worked for used to source pieces from Brimfield for high-end residential projects. She came back with an old workbench — solid, heavy, with an actual wood vise still attached. It sits in the middle of our kitchen and looks like it’s always been there, which is exactly the point. It cost a fraction of what a custom island would have and has more character than anything we could have bought new. That one was entirely her and it was exactly right.
We were painting everything ourselves. I had a sprayer, there was a lot of trim to prime, and I decided to just spray the cabinet boxes at the same time. Efficient. Logical. The primer was Kilz — latex, bright white — because we were also priming pine wainscoting in the bathroom to hide the knots, and that’s probably how I ended up with it in my hand when I got to the cabinets. It went on thick. It looked fine.
Jennifer painted the faces and boxes in a blue-gray. Really a nice color — the kind of thing that became a major design trend a few years later, which didn’t surprise me because she tends to be a few steps ahead of that. The topcoat was a Behr semi-gloss trim paint.
It never dried.
Not cured slowly. Never dried. The shelves were tacky. Things stuck to them. You’d set something down and pick it up and feel that slight resistance that means something has bonded that shouldn’t have. We waited. We repainted. Jennifer tried polyurethane over it hoping that would lock everything down. Still tacky. We lived with it for years.
The problem was probably the combination — thick latex Kilz under a latex topcoat in a house that was still damp from construction. The topcoat never properly bonded. And because the primer was white, every chip and scratch showed up bright white against the blue-gray. Over time the doors started looking rough in a way that had nothing to do with actual wear.
I repainted everything recently with actual cabinet paint and it’s holding. What I should have done from the start — if you’re going dark, don’t prime white. Get the cabinets finished close to your color from the factory, or at minimum use a dark tinted primer underneath. It seems obvious now. Most things do.
Now to the appliances, and a lesson I want to be clear about because I see people make this mistake constantly: don’t buy appliances from an online retailer that might not be around in three years.
We bought the refrigerator, dishwasher and range from homeeverything.com. A KitchenAid Architect II French door refrigerator, a Bosch Ascenta dishwasher, and a Fratelli Onofri Evolution 36-inch dual-fuel range — gas cooktop, electric oven, Italian-made, beautiful to look at. We also bought extended warranties on each through a company called Buyers Protection Group. The total was just over five thousand dollars after a coupon and a tax exemption for New York.
Homeeverything.com is out of business. Buyers Protection Group is out of business. The warranties we paid for on three appliances evaporated along with both companies.
The range hood — a Broan — came from euro-kitchen.com. Also out of business. The Broan itself is still around as a company, which is fortunate, because the hood turns itself on sometimes. Fan, light, both, for no reason anyone has ever been able to determine. We’ve looked into it. We’ve done the things you do. It just does it. Fifteen years in and we’ve stopped trying to understand it.
The Bosch dishwasher has been the best appliance purchase in the kitchen. Still running, still quiet, never a problem. The KitchenAid eventually got replaced. The Fratelli Onofri range is still going, knock on wood, but when the oven started running inaccurate we needed it serviced, and when the door hinge broke a couple of years ago I went looking for parts and found essentially nothing. Fratelli Onofri is a division of an Italian company called Terim and replacement parts in the US range from difficult to impossible. I fixed the hinge myself with what I had.
The broader problem with the range is that when we poured the concrete countertop we built it in tight around it, and it ended up sitting in an opening about a half inch narrower than a standard 36-inch spec because of how we formed the concrete. When the time comes to replace it I’ll need to cut the countertop to fit a standard replacement. The piece I’d need to cut is a small extension at the edge rather than the full slab, so in theory I can remove it, cut it, and reinstall it without reforming everything. In theory.
We now buy appliances locally, from a place that’s been in business for decades and will presumably still be there when something breaks. It costs a little more. It’s worth it.
The countertop. We liked the look of concrete more than granite or the stone surfaces that were everywhere at the time, and there was a DIY energy around concrete countertops that appealed to me. We found a book, tracked down the materials, and decided to pour in place rather than form them off-site and drop them in.
This meant building forms on top of the cabinets, pouring liquid concrete in our kitchen, and wet-sanding with diamond polishing discs while water and slurry went in every direction. I built a plastic splash barrier to try to contain it. It helped somewhat. We did all of this before we tiled the backsplash and before we finished the floor, which was the right sequencing.
My friend did the pour. I did the finishing. We rented a concrete vibrator to work the air bubbles out of the mix. For a first attempt, by two people who had never done it before, working from a book and whatever sparse resources existed online in 2009, it turned out well. Really well. The surface has character, it’s warm, it fits the house. Jennifer wanted a built-in drain board integrated into the counter next to the sink — a sloped concrete surface where dishes could drain in place. We formed it in, it looked exactly right, and it gave me an ongoing repair project because the mold pulled some concrete off the surface when we removed it, leaving that section compromised from the start. I fixed it eventually using patching compounds that are much better now than they were then. There’s a separate post about that repair if you want the details.
I’d do concrete countertops again. The material is right for this house and ours have lasted. I might think harder about pouring in place versus forming off-site, but the result is worth the process.
The backsplash is Subway Ceramics tile — the company that manufactures to the original 1921 specifications. Thick, flat, square-edged, made in the USA, not the thin pillowed-edge imitations that are everywhere now. Jennifer wanted the grout lines nearly invisible, the way subway tile was actually installed when it was first used — tight, almost seamless. The color is bone white rather than bright white, which reads warmer and more period-appropriate. My friend did the installation and it looks exactly right. Subway tile is everywhere now and has been for years, but genuine subway tile installed correctly in a house that’s trying to look like it belongs to a certain era is never going to look wrong.
We have no pantry. We thought the cabinet run would be enough. It isn’t. The pantry is currently open shelves at the bottom of the basement stairs, which functions but was not anyone’s plan. Four more feet on the house and we’d have had room for it. Four more feet solves so many things in this house that I’ve stopped counting.
The kitchen sink is also too small. It’s a Kohler K-6585 — which turns out to be a bar sink, 24¼ inches, designed as a secondary sink for an island or serving pantry. We didn’t know that when we bought it. Jennifer wants to replace it when we eventually redo the counters, and she’s right.
Grade: B+
The layout works. The Brimfield workbench island is one of the best things in the house. The concrete countertop came out better than it had any right to. The subway tile looks exactly right. The chicken wire glass in the upper cabinet doors is a detail worth stealing.
But the wrong cabinets, the paint that never dried, the Italian range with no available parts, the stove built in a half inch too tight, the warranties that went out of business before we needed them, and the pantry that doesn’t exist — most of it traces back to the same two mistakes. I was impatient when I should have waited, and I tried to save money in places where saving money cost me more in the end. Jennifer was right about the cabinets. She’s always right about the cabinets.
Next: Part 19 — Bathrooms
Even that's Odd 
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