For hands-on advice from designers and pro DIYers, plus more scrappy before-and-after transformations, subscribe to Reno. Let your in-box do all the hard work—for now. For photographer and avid cook Thayer Gowdy, there’s nothing worse than having to trek across the kitchen to grab something out of the refrigerator. “I hate the idea of it not being close to the counter,” she says. “The flow is just wrong for me.” So when she took her new Ojai, California, home down to the studs, she decided the appliance would have pride of place in her open-concept space. The only catch was she didn’t want people in the living room staring at the back of it, nor did she like the idea of building a floor-to-ceiling...
For hands-on advice from designers and pro DIYers, plus more scrappy before-and-after transformations, subscribe to Reno. Let your in-box do all the hard work—for now. Today we’re used to buying everything online—mattresses, groceries, plants. Now you can renovate your kitchen without ever getting up from the sofa, too. Semihandmade, the brand known for offering beautiful fronts for IKEA cupboards, has launched a direct-to-consumer line called Boxi by Semihandmade that’s all about getting you new, preassembled cabinets superfast. Think: three to four weeks fast. No wonder Sarah Sherman Samuel and Anita Yokota have already used them for their latest projects. “You don’t need to go to a big-box store; you don’t need to go to IKEA—that’s the exciting part,” says the company’s founder, John...
s Courtesy of Studio McGee So you want new kitchen cabinets—are you prepared for all the costs that come with them? On average, it will run you around $5,100 just to have them installed (prices for fully custom cupboards can range from $13,000 to $30,00), according to an estimate by Home Advisor. But there is a way around that expense: Put them in yourself. It’s not as impossible as it sounds. The process really comes down to screwing the new frames into the wall in the right order and triple checking everything is level. It’s a major time investment (for an average-size kitchen, it can easily take the whole weekend if not longer), but all that money you save can...
Designer Gina Gutierrez, of Gina Rachelle Design, drew up seven different kitchen layouts for her client, Lisa, an aesthetician living in the Bay Area, before settling on the right one. The part they kept getting stuck on? The supporting wall that divided the 150-square-foot space and the living room. Gutierrez played around with the idea of a partially open floor plan with a peninsula, among other arrangements, but when the homeowner gave her the green light to spend a little more, the choice became clear: They would call in a structural engineer, install a beam, and open everything up. “With only one window in there, the space was actually quite dark,” recalls Gutierrez (and the linoleum floors weren’t helping the...
For weeks, I’ve been living with a far-from-functional kitchen. The Los Angeles cabin that me and my husband, Buck Mason founder Erik Ford, recently purchased is essentially a full-on construction zone, and we’ve been making do with a $100 laundry tub as a sink and a rickety, stand-alone dishwasher, which I swiftly cover up with a blanket when not in use. I was gung-ho on renovating the room, but then the COVID-19 pandemic happened. It has majorly impacted everything. While the California governor’s office has deemed construction an essential service in the state, I’m not having visitors over right now, and this includes most contractors. But instead of letting quarantine put a damper on my timeline, I’m taking matters into my...
