Craftsman Kitchen, Opened to the Back of the House

The brief

The owners had lived with the kitchen for eleven years and had one complaint that covered all the others: you could not see or talk to anyone from it. The room was sealed behind a bearing wall, with a single doorway to the dining room and a second to a back hall that nobody used.

They did not want the house to stop looking like a 1922 Craftsman. That ruled out the obvious answer of removing everything and starting from a blank rectangle.

What we found

The wall between kitchen and dining room was carrying the second floor, which we expected. What we did not expect was that a previous remodel had already notched two joists to run a waste line, leaving the span weaker than the drawings implied. That correction was priced and approved before we framed anything.

The original fir floor ran continuously under the 1970s vinyl in the kitchen. It was in better condition than the exposed floor in the dining room, which changed the flooring plan for the better and saved the owners the cost of new material.

What we did

We removed the bearing wall and carried the load on a flush beam set into the ceiling, so the finished ceiling reads as one continuous plane rather than announcing where the wall used to be. The island sits where the wall stood.

Cabinetry is painted inset with a shaker profile drawn from the original built-ins in the dining room. New trim was milled to match the existing casing profile — the two are indistinguishable once painted, which was the point.

The result

One connected space across the back of the house, and a kitchen that looks like it could have been built with the house. The electrical panel was replaced along the way, which was overdue independently of the remodel.