Here you can see the exterior of the addition. The lumber materials you see on the ground are for the deck we were about to begin construction on that would surround the addition.

Now if you can look at this picture as three separate structures, you will see the original house on the left, the original garage on the right, and the new kitchen addition in the middle with the two french doors. Before the addition the garage and the house were separate structures. We tied them together with the new addition. You would never know. Everything went seamlessly.

Notice the two small windows that are located above the roof line of the addition. They were not part of the original design of the addition. Originally there were two full size windows located there. The customer, however, decided that they wanted to extend the original distance that the addition would come out from the existing back wall of the house. Of course by do that it meant that the height at which the roof met the back wall of the house was increased. A flat roof was not an option here, so as a result we replaced the full size windows with the small rolling windows you see pictured to allow for the increased height in the roof. The customer was happy so we were happy.

Up next is the exterior pine deck that wraps the new addition, finishing off the project.

This is a close-up of the kitchen island at the Franklin kitchen addition, already being used as you can see. You can see the breakfast-bar on the backside of the island. The kitchen island as well as the rest of the cabinetry features dark granite countertop surfaces. The sink as well as the dishwasher are also located within the island.

As I mentioned in the previous article, this island is highly customized. The customer had chosen maple cabinetry and we used maple plywood to enclose the back and sides of this island. You remember that 2″x6″ frame sitting in the middle of the room in part 1 of this series? That is what we used to create the breakfast bar and run our rough electric and plumbing through.

We are done with the interior of the kitchen at this point. The hardwood flooring has been installed and finished. It’s a bit in the distance, but, if you look at the doorway on the left side you will notice the tie-in area that I had mentioned in the last post regarding the hardwood flooring. It matched beautifully.

This is a unique almost minimalist design with regards to the cabinetry and island layout. Most of our kitchen remodels usually involve custom cabinetry, however, the budget on this project didn’t allow for that. These cabinets were ordered as standard sized base and wall units from one of our pre-built cabinet manufactures and offered considerable savings over our custom cabinetry offerings. The center island is heavily customized and I will discuss that in the next article.

You will notice a large post and beam in the middle of the room. We removed almost half of the back wall of the 1st floor of the house and replaced it with laminated beams after we had built the addition that extended the kitchen out into the backyard.

Here you can see the hardwood flooring partially installed. On this project we were going to be tying our new hardwood floor in with an existing hardwood floor. They met in a wide opening between the new kitchen area and an existing hallway. For this reason we did not go with a pre-finished hardwood flooring product, we finished it post installation to achieve the best possible match with the existing floor.

You will also notice a rough 2″x6″ frame in the middle of the room. As you will see in an upcoming post, this frame allowed for the creation of a raised area of the kitchen island that serves as a “breakfast bar” type area. Notice the rough plumbing withing the frame as well. By putting the rough plumbing there, as opposed to up-through the base-cabinet unit that would house the sink, it allowed for more storage area underneath the sink.

At this stage we are about halfway done with this project. Sorry, no pictures before this point.