Redoing the kitchen, and having the renovation spread to incorporate the family room forced us to deal with several issues earlier than I'd planned. They're all small things that take up an incredible amount of time but are important because some of them they carry over to every room in the house.
Lighting... we would like to go with recessed LED lighting in the kitchen, most likely 4 inches so the lights themselves would stand out a bit less. This will probably carry into the family room (easy decision) but of course, how many, where, and how a ceiling fan will be incorporated into this is anyone's guess. It's also looking like the ceiling above the round table in the breakfast area will remain 8 feet high due to the way the roof was designed originally that would be nearly impossible to change. I'm not sure how to handle lighting in that part of the room, and whether it will be on the same switch as general family room lighting is on. Probably so...
The ceiling in the family room is easy. Paneling, painted white in our case, was common in 1959 when the house was built. That's what we'll go with.
The really hard ones to handle are the door hardware and the actual doors. It's hard to find something that looks age-appropriate for the place and at the same time stands out just a bit. Most knobs are round with a round plate behind them regardless of where they are on the niceness scale. After an exhaustive search we were able to find something sort of drum-shaped with a square background that should work for us.
Doors remain a huge challenge. Right now we have two originals that are louvered which I plan on keeping. They do a great job allowing air to flow in and out of closets and the style is ok. For bedrooms and bathrooms though this would be a terrible choice. The only items readily available to us are several hollow core choices that we aren't interested in, and six panel solid core. They look nice but are more conservative than what we're trying to do. I think flat, solid core may also be available at the nearest big box as a special order item but I'm a bit nervous about going with that since I don't know what kind of wood they're finished with and how it would look. There are tons of choices online but they get a bit pricey and last time I counted we need about nine of them. Don't even ask about what we're doing for casing.
This one will take a while to resolve. Of course, I'm cutting in the doorway between the master bedroom and family room today...
