Kitchen Update - Part 1

[First in a series of Kitchen Update posts. All written in June and re-dated to be closer to when they occurred.]

My "New House" post shows photos of the house as it looked when we decided to buy it. We really liked what the previous owners - Mike & Jen - had done to the place. (If not, we wouldn't have bought since neither of us had much enthusiasm for taking on a big remodel project.)

However, the new house didn't have a laundry room or laundry closet. In fact, it didn't have a washer & dryer anywhere at all. It did have plumbing for an under-counter combination unit to go in the kitchen (replacing the cabinet 2 to the right of the stove in this photo).

As the laundress in our household, I made a management decision and told Bill this just wouldn't work for me. (I like our current, fairly new, washer & dryer quite a lot plus my past experience with the combination units was not impressive.)

So, we knew we needed to make a change. We also knew that we quite liked what the previous owners had done in the kitchen and we determined fairly quickly that our solution needed to be located somewhere along this "east" wall. (All water and sewer in this house is on this one wall and the house is built on a slab.)

After pondering a bit and consulting with some folks who know way more about this than we do, we came up with a plan.

We decided to take out 2 under-counter cabinets, install the washer & dryer side-by-side and put a door across the front to hide them from view. (Our washer & dryer are 24-inch wide front loaders.) To buy the necessary extra front-to-back space, the 2x4s  in the back wall were going to be turned flat. The idea was that there would be one cabinet next to the stove and then the washer & dryer, side-by-side, under the counter top. (Having the washer & dryer right in the middle of the kitchen wasn't ideal, but we decided we could make it work.)

So, Bill started tearing up our lovely kitchen. These photos are from later in the process, but they show what he found when he removed several cabinets under the kitchen windows.

The problem with this plan became apparent immediately. The bottom of the wall is poured concrete and changing the 2x4s was not going to change the depth (front-to-back) at floor level one bit.

It was time for plan B.