Sustainable Kitchen With Open Design

The main goal for homeowners Ryan Wiedemann and Joleen Borgerding was to make their kitchen feel open. The original kitchen was walled off from the rest of the living space, which deterred them from enjoying the pretty outdoor views from the living room. To open up the space they removed two walls as well as pocket doors, which separated the kitchen from the living space.

"There was a big space along the wall that was underutilized," Ryan says. Shuffling the cabinets to a different layout allowed for more storage and created additional floor space. Ryan framed out a handy cleaning closet to the left of the refrigerator using pocket doors that formerly were used as an entrance to the old kitchen.

The couple refinished the original cabinets. "There's a certain choice to reusing the cabinets," says Ryan. "They're functional, good cabinets and we thought there's no need to fill a landfill with them."

Ryan built additional cabinets with sustainable bamboo plywood and lined the hearth with local cedar planks. The dark lines between the planks is painted sheetrock. "I wanted to add some different textures and colors and add some depth to the wood-paneled hearth wall," he says.