Whether Mother Nature or a Building Sprinkler Goes Awry

We just finished up a kitchen design & installation job for a client whose condo had been flooded.  Twice. By a building sprinkler system.

Contractors doing renovation work in the unit upstairs set off the system by accident both times.  It caused hundreds of gallons of water to come down into my client’s condo.

Untangling the Insurance Knot

As it turned out, her homeowner’s insurance would pay to replace the kitchen.  That was the good news.

The bad news was, it would pay only the depreciated amount of what the kitchen was worth at the time of the flood.  So instead of a $40,000 tag for the original 10 year old kitchen, her total budget was closer to $18,000.

Such is the fine print in a homeowner’s insurance policy, take heed.

EcoMod + IKEA = Another Happy Ending

We put in a new IKEA kitchen for her, same basic footprint as the destroyed one.

Not only was it less cost than the original, but it had more features like soft closures (no more finger pinching or door slamming) and a 25 year warranty, to boot! She also had enough left over to get some new light fixtures she’d been coveting for months.

She is happily back home & delighted to have her life back together.

I’ll be the first to say the photos aren’t the best – I need a wide angle to really do it justice. Here we go:

Before

This kitchen had generic crap cabinets with minimal storage & drawers.

After

We took advantage of the 10′ ceilings in the space & ran a second level of wall cabinets. Also of note:

• custom spice rack,
• backsplash
• undercab lighting
• & cart storage garage.

Arm bone = connected to the neck bone?

So everything’s disconnected in your beloved kitchen. Seems a little more important now, doesn’t it? We don’t realize how much we use it until it’s not entirely there. Ok so maybe the fridge is still available, and the table & chairs are just relocated temporarily. But how are you going to cook, or prepare some semblance of a healthy meal? You can’t order pizza and Chinese every night. Well, you could, but I digress.

Makeshift, make do

If you’re into camping, you could put your gear to use – your trusty stove and grill. But you still have to deal with finding surfaces to slice & dice, and function like a built in kitchen would.

Or you could snag this outdoor kitchen setup from Viteo. It comes in modules, so the sink & surface module could be inside, hooked up to your water & drain connection, but out of the way of construction.  It’d be even better on lockable casters. Then you could wheel it up to the hookups and away only when you needed to use it.

Project complete: Indoor – Outdoor

Once the kitchen remodel’s finished, you can hang on to the modules and have a ready made outdoor setup. Closer to the compost pile, out with Mother Nature.