Designer Tracey Stephens was tasked with creating a retro-style kitchen that features vintage furniture and checkerboard floors for a New Jersey family of four. But the requirements of the technology age were not lost on the design. The kitchen includes a drawer with a built-in charger, complete with regular and USB outlets.
Depending on your counter material, an angled top can be a large extra expense — for example, when using a prefab rectangular counter slab in stone or butcher block. Or it can eat up too much precious floor space or not fit well around an island. But this drawer option allows you to keep your counter to a basic L-shape while still getting handy drawer space. Corner drawers like this work well for storing small items that can fit into the odd angles, making them a good place to store cooking utensils, seasoning jars and other small items.
In the case of angled uppers, they are best paired with an angled lower cabinet. If you mix an angled upper cabinet with a standard lower corner, the upper may protrude too far into your face for you to easily use the lower counter. However, an angled lower with a typical upper works just fine and gives you lots of breathing room.
This may be the queen of the shallow end cabinets. More than half a million people have added this photo to their Houzz ideabooks. This double decker has hooks for keys and cork board on the upper door, a dry-erase board and room for markers on top and file sorters for every member of the family below. This is great for sorting mail, keeping track of permission slips and homework assignments and stashing favorite magazines, catalogs and coloring books.
Flooring: Wright used a trick she’d heard about and successfully tried in a recent restaurant project. “I put down the first layer of stain on the concrete floors and then threw Miracle-Gro [plant fertilizer] on it in these sort-of starburst patterns. The copper in the Miracle-Gro reacts with the acids and creates some blues and greens in the floors that you can see when the sunlight hits them,” she says. “Get the basic old-fashioned Miracle-Gro, the ‘dollar store’ kind to do this.” After letting it sit and react for a while, she added another coat of finish on top.
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