Felida — Vancouver, WA 98685
The Ross family did not want a bigger kitchen. They wanted the one they had to stop fighting them: an angled peninsula that closed the room off, a sink jammed into its corner, a microwave mounted above the range, and dark maple cabinets with almost no storage worth using. We kept the layout broadly where it was and rebuilt everything inside it — a longer straight peninsula with the sink in the middle of it, a full-height pantry in what used to be a hall closet, custom white oak shaker cabinets from Moda Cabinets, and Crystal Grey quartz throughout. Six weeks, no walls moved, and a kitchen that finally belongs to the house it sits in.
This is a 1990s Felida home with a good floor plan and a kitchen that had not kept up with it. The room was open to the great room on paper, but an angled peninsula ran across the opening and the sink sat in the corner of it, facing a return wall. Standing at the sink you were working in a pocket, with your back to the room and roughly a foot of counter to either side.
The rest of it followed from there. The microwave was mounted above the range, which put a hot appliance at eye height over a second one. Base cabinets were deep boxes with doors and fixed shelves, so the back half of every one of them was effectively lost. There was no pantry — though there was an unused closet recess in the hall right beside the kitchen, which turned out to matter a great deal. And the finishes, yellowed maple with dark green speckled granite, pulled the light out of a room that has a vaulted ceiling and windows on two sides.
All five of the homeowners’ own photos of the original kitchen are below — select any of them to open the full gallery.
The homeowners’ brief was specific, which makes a project like this much easier to design against:
Nothing on that list required moving a wall, and none of it required borrowing space from another room. It required spending the space the kitchen already had differently — which is exactly the kind of remodel custom cabinetry is for. Every extra inch of counter and every cubic foot of new storage in this kitchen came out of the same footprint, by rebuilding the peninsula, claiming an unused closet, and replacing door boxes with drawers.
Keeping the layout also kept the project to six weeks and kept the plumbing and electrical scope proportionate: the sink and dishwasher moved a few feet within the same run, the microwave got a new circuit, and the range hood got ducted. That is a very different job from relocating a kitchen.
The angled peninsula came out and was rebuilt as a single straight run, several feet longer, square to the room. The sink moved out of its cramped corner and into the middle of that new peninsula, which is the change the homeowners notice most: you now stand at the sink facing the great room, with clear counter on both sides of the bowl instead of a wall on one side and a corner on the other.
The recess beside the kitchen was doing almost nothing. Moda Cabinets built a full-height, eight-door pantry cabinet in paint-grade alder to fill it wall to wall and floor to ceiling. That single cabinet holds more than the old kitchen’s entire lower run, and it took no floor area away from the kitchen because the recess was already there.
The over-range microwave was the homeowners’ least favourite thing in the house. It now sits in its own open cabinet niche at counter height, above a bank of drawers, where it can be loaded and unloaded without reaching across a hot cooktop. A stainless chimney hood took its place above the range — which is what that wall wanted in the first place.
Nearly every base cabinet became a drawer bank. Drawers turn a deep, dark cabinet into storage you can actually see into, which is most of the reason the finished kitchen holds so much more without being any bigger. The corner was reworked at the same time so the counter now wraps continuously from the refrigerator past the range.
The brief was to lighten the room without turning it cold, so the cabinets are stained white oak in a shaker profile — still warm, still wood, just no longer yellow. Crystal Grey quartz replaced the green granite, and Artisan Frost ceramic subway tile runs the length of the backsplash. Together they lift the light level noticeably while keeping the transitional feel of the rest of the house.
Glass pendants over the peninsula, white oak floating shelves beside the sink, a glass-front hutch cabinet by the laundry door, and brushed hardware throughout. Small moves, but they are what tie the kitchen to the living space it now opens onto rather than looking like a kitchen bolted to it.
The kitchen was taken back to bare walls and rebuilt. Our in-house crew handled design, demolition, framing, cabinet installation, tile and finish carpentry, with licensed, vetted trade partners on the plumbing and electrical scopes — the relocated sink waste and the hood duct in particular. One Serden Group project manager ran the schedule, the cabinet shop coordination and the inspections from the first walkthrough to the final punch list.
A transitional kitchen lives or dies on how its materials sit together — warm enough to match an established home, light enough to brighten it. These are the products this kitchen was built from, and who supplied them.
Six weeks is a realistic number for a custom kitchen only when the cabinets are ordered early — a custom shop typically needs four to eight weeks to build, so those weeks run alongside demolition and rough-in rather than after them. The sequence below is dictated by inspections and by the fact that quartz can only be templated off cabinets that are already installed.
Week 1
Protect the route in, pull the old cabinets, counters, tile and appliances, and take out the angled peninsula. With the room empty the new layout gets snapped out on the floor and the hall closet recess is opened up and reframed for the pantry cabinet.
Week 2
Waste and supply relocated for the sink’s new position in the peninsula, dishwasher line run, circuits pulled for the pendants, the microwave niche and the range hood, and the hood ducted to the exterior. Rough plumbing and electrical inspected and signed off.
Week 3
Patch and finish drywall where the peninsula and closet were reworked, prime and paint, and get the floor and walls flat and true. This is the quiet week, and it is also when the cabinets are being finished in the shop.
Week 4
The white oak shaker cabinets and the full-height painted pantry are delivered and set: scribed, levelled, fastened and aligned. The peninsula box goes in at its new length, and the microwave niche and floating shelves are built in.
Week 5
Crystal Grey quartz is templated off the installed cabinets — which is why it cannot happen any earlier — then fabricated and set. Sink and faucet plumbed, dishwasher connected, appliances slid in and the range hood mounted.
Week 6
Artisan Frost subway tile set and grouted, pendants and under-cabinet lighting finished, hardware installed, trim and touch-up paint completed. Final inspection, punch list and a walkthrough with the homeowners.
49 photos of the completed kitchen — the last tile in the strip is a shot of the original room, kept in for comparison. Select any image to open the full gallery, which also carries the 5 before photos further up this page.
“What an amazing transformation! Our remodeled kitchen is bright, open and efficient, with more cabinetry than we even dreamed was possible. A pleasure to use it.”
Mary R.
Google review — Vancouver, WA