Started with a 1950s small “U” shaped kitchen with too little counter space, poor quality cabinets, electric stove and oversized side-by-side refridgerator looking out on a glorious back yard. We wanted to make the space more usable, expand, and recreate the mission style feel we had created in our previous home. We decided to proceed on a multi-phased approach to gut the kitchen and begin replacing sections and make enhancements as I would be designing and building the new cabinets out of quarter-sawn red oak. The kitchen had to remain usable during these transitions as we did not have the luxury of an alternative solution. As the project evolved the dominos began to fall. For example, when we decided to bump-out an interior wall into the living room, the hallway to the upstairs bedrooms was blocked. This necessitated a new opening to get to the bedrooms resulting in a spare bedroom becoming a new dining room and creating a panelled archway (with hidden closets) as the entrance and removing one of the other walls to enlarge the new dining room. The final phase of the kitchen involved removing the majority of a wall separating the kitchen from the adjoining breakfast room with french doors onto our deck overlooking the forested medow in our back yard. My wife wanted the surface of the counter separating the kitcken from breakfast room to be topped with copper. The result was a much larger kitchen with much more storage, soapstone counters, lighted display cabinets on top, quarter sawn red oak solid flooring to match the cabinets, a propane Wolf cooktop, propane wall oven/broiler, Sub Zero with QS Oak panels, and a very open feel. All work was done myself with the exception of the copper counter where a friend with metal-working experience did the majority of the work on the top.