You can probably do what you're suggesting but you will lose cabinet space. A better idea would be to go straight up and out the roof.

I had the same problem with the joists. My GC considered going sideways out the ceiling (running with the joists) to the adjoining garage, then turning and going across the ceiling of the garage. We couldn't do that because of a chimney in the way. So he went up, then back into the wall behind the range, then down into the basement, and across the basement ceiling. Is it perfect? No,it is a long path and has lots of turns. But it works OK, and it was a creative solution.

Would either of those ideas work for you? Weissman's approach would be better if you can do it. And why can't you just move the range to the outside wall? I couldn't either, but my kitchen is a lot smaller than yours.

Thanks, Ginny and Weissman.

Weissman, I'll have to check if that's an option, but I suspect it's not. Our house is really a 1.5 story and I think the area above the stove is actually open (i.e. the wall ends). Worth a look though, presuming that I don't have to open up any walls up there to do it. We just finished a massive renovation that involved taking the top off and putting on higher and I'm not willing to do anything that messes with the new walls, etc. up there.

Ginny, given what you did, I suspect we could just bring it down and link up with the existing downdraft ducting (which does go through the basement) but I was hoping to avoid going up, down and around if possible (for the best ventilation performance).

Don't be fooled by the crazy fish-eye angle of that photo ... the kitchen is really pretty small so there would be no where to put the range. Plus, we're not touching the bottom cabinets other than to reface them so messing with the layout is not in the budget. Plus, I really like the layout the way it is.

I'd do it!

Sure, you'll lose cabinet space (that you currently don't have anyway!) but you won't have to worry about losing stuff in the back of tall cabinet shelves on that side. You will still have a little usable space in front of the duct.

I would do it. We did it in our new kitchen which, although it has 110" ceilings, has a horizonal beam which comes down about 7" so we had to run the duct below that. So our situation is pretty close to yours. Frankly, the top cabinet shelf would likely have been hard to reach anyway (for most people). If you have an 8" duct (which is fine for a 1200 cfm blower), and allow an inch to cover the duct if you want to do that, you are still looking at usable space over 7 feet high. Hard to imagine that is not enough.

Thank you for weighing in Fori and NYCbluedevil!

That's sort of what I was thinking ... I'm 5'2" so realistically I will rarely visit the top shelf of those cabinets anyway, so it's not a huge loss of practical space anyway. The main reason I want to take the cabinets up to the ceiling anyway is to create the illusion of more height and get rid of that godforsaken greasy dust catching ledge up there!

There's nothing wrong with doing it knowing that you will lose storage space in the top shelf of the cabinet. But are you really going to use that space anyway? I mean, that's pretty tall.

The alternative might be to install a false front board at the top of a 'standard' cabinet painted the same color. I think that should be less expensive than a larger custom cabinet, maybe not.

I'm assuming you're planning on going up, 90* turn to the left and out the wall? This would place the vent near the window? There may be code restrictions on this buy your GC should know.

Weedmeister ... excellent point about the vent proximity to the window situation. We ran into that when venting the exhaust fan in our new bathroom upstairs. Definitely worth checking out before I get too involved in shopping for vents.

We did ours that way, in fact we built a special curved cabinet for the duct work. We use that cabinet for smaller things, can opener, transformer for the Hunter Douglass blinds in adjacent dining room, timer, just a general "Catch all" for our smaller stuff.

After 6 years, we are still very happy it with it.
The power unit for the vent is outside and it has a very short run from the vent with just one gradual 90 degree turn, (from up to sideways and out).

Here's a picture of same.

Gary

Thank you so much jscout ... that's exactly what I was thinking. I'll show your pictures to my cabinet maker.

dodge59, those curved cabinets are really cool.

you could also just make either a soffit or a tall crown molding with a flat vertical piece between your cabinet top and the crown molding at the ceiling. If your upper shelf is taken by the duct anyhow that might be much cheaper than buying new upper cabs, and can look spectacular. Is that a ceiling beam on the left of the picture? Much easier to deal with that through molding than working upper cabs around it. I linked a site with some solutions (I am not related, just found it on google).

Here is a link that might be useful: some solutions

Thanks, Scrappy. Also an excellent suggestion and one I've been tossing around in my head as well. That is a beam off to the left. The only cabinet it affects is the hutch under it so either cabinet can stay as is (plus refacing).

Excellent ideas here. Thank you all for your help.

What J did in the pic above is the 2nd alternative I was thinking of. That is, use a 'shorter' cabinet but with taller doors. It would depend on the look you are going for and the other cabinets.

I want to echo Weed's caution about being sure on code compliance when having your vent going out near that window.

Last year, when I was doing a re-routed of the vent on my range hood, the local building inspector happened by. (We are on pretty good terms so there was no compliance issue.) I asked him about the rules and got a long dissertation as he handed vent tubing up to me. The gist of it was that the rules for range hood vents are different than for those that directly vent gas appliances (say a water heater power vent). There is some discretion when it comes to venting from a range hood over a gas stove. How far the vent has to be from an opening window also varies with whether the vent is above the opening window, at window level or below window level. I was told the vent that is above an opening window can be closer than one at or below window level.

BUT, you want to be sure that, if you open the window while the hood is running, it won't be sucking in the vaporous stuff that was just blown out the vent.

Very old thread. But if anyone is still around… thinking about doing the same thing. Anyone consider splitting the upper cabinet so there is say a 12” cabinet where the vent goes through and then 24” beneath for storage?

What did you end up doing? I’m in the same predicament.