Some projects you remember by the season they ended in. The Marine Avenue build is one we remember by the family that ran it with us. Here is the long version of how it came together.
The owners came to us in the fall of the prior year with a sketch on a piece of graph paper and a clear idea about one thing: they wanted the kitchen to be where the people were. Everything else, they said, we could figure out together. That is usually a good sign. It means the client trusts the work, and is willing to participate without trying to manage every line.
The lot was a tear-down. The existing house was not worth saving, and the family had lived on the street long enough to know exactly what they did and did not want from the next one. They wanted a long open ground floor with the kitchen at the center, three good bedrooms upstairs, and a deck off the back that could host twenty people without crowding. They did not want anything that would feel out of place on Marine Avenue twenty years from now.
Breaking ground
We broke ground in late January. The first month of any build on the island is the loud one. Demolition, foundation prep, plumbing rough-ins under the slab. We try to be the kind of crew the neighbors do not dread. That means clean sidewalks at the end of every day, no music outside on residential blocks, and a foreman whose phone is always on. On Marine Avenue, the family next door has small children. We adjusted the schedule so that the loudest work happened during school hours. Nobody complained, which is the highest compliment a job site on Balboa can earn.
The foundation work took longer than usual because the soil report came back asking for more piers than we had planned. This is the kind of news that sounds bad and is, in fact, good. It means the engineer is doing their job, and the house will sit on a base that does not move. We rebid the piers, took the schedule hit, and kept going.
By April the frame was up. The owners came by for a walk-through, stood in what was about to become the kitchen, and finally believed the house was going to be real. There is a moment on every project when that happens. The owner stops asking questions about the plans and starts asking questions about the light switches. That is when you know the build is on its way.
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The kitchen we built around
The kitchen was the brief. Everything else served it. The island ended up nine and a half feet long because we wanted a single piece of stone with no seam, and that was the longest slab the supplier could find in the color the family had chosen. The cabinets were custom, built in a shop in Costa Mesa by a maker who has done a half-dozen of our kitchens over the past decade. The hood was the third one we mocked up, and the first one the family agreed on without revision.
What you cannot see in the finished photo is the work underneath. The kitchen sits over a beam that we resized twice during framing because the original plan would have left a column in the middle of the room. We took a small hit on the second-floor framing to make that beam work. The owners never saw the change. They saw an open kitchen.
"The best kitchens disappear. You stop noticing the room and start noticing the people in it. That is the whole goal."
By late fall the house was closed in. The trim went in over the winter, the floors followed in February, and we did final paint and punch-list in March. The family moved in on a Saturday morning with a moving truck and three boxes of groceries. They cooked dinner in the new kitchen that night.
I drove past the house last week. The porch light was on. The kids were on the deck. The kitchen, from the street, looked exactly the way we hoped it would look. That is the part of the job that is hard to put into a portfolio. The house has become the family's, in the way that all the good ones do, and we are no longer needed there. Which is the right outcome.
If you are thinking about a build like this one, give us a call. We will talk it through with you.