My parents had a custom home built for our family back in the early 1960s (I was very, very young). The house had the latest modern conveniences, especially in the kitchen. One of those conveniences was a pantry with a two-level lazy Susan to conveniently present whatever my mom was looking for with a simple spin of the wheel (sometimes it presented me, if I was playing on the lazy Susan at the time. We younger kids thought this was fascinating - no more going down to the cellar for the flour or sugar.

It all seems so primitive now, though, as the pantry has become 'a kitchen within.’ The Pantry is a room of its own, sometimes even expanded into a Scullery Kitchen as today's kitchens are approaching truly gourmet level. For most folks today, the pantry is an overflow area to the kitchen, and is designed to look and to serve as not merely a storage area, but a mini-kitchen in itself.

If the pantry is still a cabinet, it is a bank of cabinets with roll-out shelves to make reaching the stuff in the back much easier. Sometimes it doubles as an appliance garage, with the microwave oven, toaster, blender, and mixer in place, plugged in, and ready to use. But if space allows, the pantry becomes its own domain, with open shelves, coffee bar, microwave station, and loads and loads of storage. A second sink, and even a second dishwasher, takes the load off the main kitchen.

Sometimes we announce the pantry with a frosted glass door, other times we hide it completely with faux cabinet doors - but it's there, and it has taken on an outsized importance in the modern kitchen, the 'kitchen within.’

We at Designed for Downtown, LLC strive to incorporate the latest labor-saving and user-friendly features in our renovation and custom home designs, including the most beautiful as well as most functional pantries.

Give us a call today to start the conversation about how to make your kitchen work better by adding a 'kitchen within.'

In our last blog post, we spoke of the home renovation process as a metamorphosis, the transformation of the tired caterpillar into the beautiful butterfly. To carry that analogy a little further, if you look closely at the butterfly you can still see the former caterpillar. In a similar way, we at AJH Renovations, LLC and Designed for Downtown, LLC will design the renovation of a mature home so that the shadows of the former house remain, only beautified and accented. This process is called reclamation, and it’s both a lot of fun and a lot of work.

Due to the conditions of construction fifty or more years ago, and the rigors of the modern International Building Code, we are not often able to reuse existing materials in the same use for the renovation. Hardwood flooring may have been refinished one too many times to allow it to be reused as flooring, original windows are usually single-pane and no longer meet energy standards, lighting fixtures were installed before UL ratings and are probably no longer safe enough for reuse for the same purpose. But all is not lost, and these original materials need not be sent to the landfill.

Early 20 th Century single-pane windows can be repurposed as accent cabinetry doors for a wet bar or utility zone; attic plank flooring becomes wainscot for the new second-story living space, and old wall paneling is incorporated into the custom cabinetry design as door and drawer panels. Old beams in an out-building become new mantels, and even an unused old washstand can be converted into a single-sink vanity. A new renovation, and a house full of memories at the same time.

We at Designed for Downtown, LLC and AJH Renovations, LLC frankly love old homes and, while we understand that times change and houses need to keep up with the latest technology, safety features, and styles, we still want to be able to see that caterpillar almost hidden, but not quite, by the beautiful butterfly. Give us a call today to start the conversation of mixing the old with the new in your home’s future life.

A whole-house renovation is very much a metamorphosis – a ‘change of form’ not unlike the dramatic change of a caterpillar to a butterfly. We don’t get to see the amazing transformation of the caterpillar to the butterfly because it’s all done inside a cocoon. It might be a good idea, though few would be willing to pay for it, to wrap the entire renovation site in a similar cocoon, because the renovation process is probably as ugly as the metamorphosis of the insect. Some of our renovations over the years have been so dramatic that the homeowners have admitted to low-grade depression and even tears after the demolition phase. Alas, for the cocoon. I guess the adage, “you have to crack some eggs to make an omelet” applies.

It’s not always that bad. At AJH Renovations, LLC and our sister design studio, Designed for Downtown, LLC, we do try to preserve as much of the old house look as we can. Sometimes, when the renovation is mostly inside, the shell of the house acts like that cocoon, hiding the transformation until complete (of course, you have to get invited in to see the butterfly). But, frankly, some houses are just too run down or, to be honest, ugly. When that is the case, metamorphosis is the solution. Sometimes the only indication that the butterfly used to be the caterpillar is the house number! It’s an exciting process, giving a new lease on life to an old home or, as our tag line says, “Turning a 20th Century House into a 21st Century Home.”

At AJH Renovations, LLC we know that the process is not pretty, and that there will be times when all seems lost and hopeless. But the design is there, the drawings are done and the material & finishes selected. Soon the butterfly will emerge and the metamorphosis will be complete! Give us a call today at AJH Renovations, LLC and let us help you with your ugly caterpillar.

The Proverbs advise us to “Prepare your outside work, make it fit for yourself in the field; and afterward build your house.” It is sound advice: establish yourself a source of income before investing money in your home. But man has added a fourth stanza after the building of one’s home: ‘prepare yourself gardens.’ It is an interesting characteristic of human nature that, after we have established our income – our ‘outside work’ – and built our habitation, we return to the ‘outside’ and prepare gardens. It is a consistent feature of archaeological discoveries that when a society becomes prosperous (sort of a prerequisite to even having something for archaeologists to discover), it goes back outside and builds elaborate gardens.

One of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World is Nebuchadnezzar’s ‘Hanging Gardens’ of Babylon. Gardening is both a timeless and international pastime, with famous examples stretching from Tivoli, Italy to Kyoto, Japan and back to Versailles, France. But for most of human history, pleasure gardens were for the rich; commonfolk were too busy tending their own vegetable patch for survival to give thought (or money) to something built entirely for aesthetic enjoyment.

Modern Western civilization has seen prosperity spread much wider than anyone dreamed possible even a hundred or so years ago. Men and women still follow the same basic, proverbial path of ‘preparing their work outside’ – afterward finding their ‘forever home’ – and finally going back outside to prepare that envelope of enjoyment we called ‘gardens.’ The transition begins at the porch or patio and moves to the outdoor kitchen or cabana, with appropriate shade trees and seasonal flower beds.

All of this requires forethought and design, and that is why the AJH family of design/build companies – AJH Renovations, LLC; Designed for Downtown, LLC; and AJH Custom Homes, LLC – added landscape design to our portfolio of services. Personalizing one’s own garden space can be the work of a lifetime, but our design studio can definitely get you started with a master plan. Give us a call today to start the conversation.