Checking in on the Matawatchan Project

Recently, hubby and I spent the weekend with our friends at their log home property in Matawatchan.  You remember the Matawatchan project.  I wrote about it here and again here.  Well our friends A&N have been very busy over the last 18 months (yes it’s been that long since I last posted about this), and have made tremendous progress on the house, now with windows, doors, sunroom and screened porch.

Here’s a couple of shots of the progress we’ve seen:

The front of the home with a retaining wall that took A quite some effort to complete.

The front entrance and garden has a wonderful rustic appeal.

Here is the screened in porch where we spent a good portion of our weekend, with some great food and no shortage of red wine :).

Now, down to work…

One of the major areas they’ve been working on is the kitchen. Last we left off, we had settled on a kitchen layout that felt right.

Well, while we were reviewing the layout, we came across the fact that the stove would need a fan of some sort.  The first option was an overhead unit like this one:

Source:  Sarah Richardson Design (via Pinterest)

Not wanting to obstruct the views within the open layout first floor space, the overhead unit was vetoed. That left an integrated unit, like this.

Source: www.dacor.com

Two problems there, first, with a raised glass breakfast bar, the room for pop up vent was limited.  And secondly, where do you vent to?  After some discussion we decided to modify the floor plan somewhat to accommodate an outdoor venting of the stove.  Here is the new layout:

You’ll notice we’ve moved the stove over to the other side of the kitchen.  It’s now on an outside wall which facilitates the venting for the stove.  Not only that, there is now a really nice big space for food preparation.  A vent hood hasn’t been selected yet, but there’s plenty of room to house one now.

The next step for the kitchen is finalizing the cabinet configuration, that is drawers versus doors.

Currently A&N are trialling the new layout using a combination of cabinets they removed from their condo in the city with pieces they’ve used up to this point for their makeshift kitchen.  The reviews so far are good!

 

It’s a long term project, but I’m very excited to see the progress as we move towards the finished project.

In my next Matawatchan post I’ll tell you all about some of the issues we have with the master bedroom layout upstairs.