A Room for Improvement
Several years ago, when Craig Opsahl left his native Minnesota and bought a house in Tustin, he felt settled down for good.
But then he visited a famed Eichler home, one of thousands built in Southern California 50 to 60 years ago by developer Joseph Eichler.
Opsahl was so enamored of the Eichler style--low-pitched roofs, wood ceilings with open beams, mahogany paneling, skylights and, most notably, central atriums around which the rooms and hallways radiate with a maximum of windows, glass and sliding doors--that he immediately put his Tustin house on the market and started looking for an Eichler home of his own.
“How could you not want this?” Opsahl asks, standing in the sunny Eichler he bought in 1997. “In Minnesota you’re boxed in all the time.”
Opsahl, a creative director for Option One, a mortgage company in Santa Ana, chose a 2,300-square-foot model in a neighborhood in Orange where 144 near-pristine Eichlers line the streets, and neighbors feel free to ask just about anyone for a home tour.
Once into his house, Opsahl started remodeling--a skill he learned years ago when he bought a distressed urban renewal house for $1 and fixed it up.
To his 1962 Eichler he added a backyard pool, another sliding door, Berber carpeting and a new roof. But eventually, Opsahl and his partner Barry Russell, a dean at Cerritos College, confronted the dilemma that most Eichler owners face: What to do with the kitchen?
The original kitchen featured bright orange-and-white cabinet door fronts, set onto dark wood boxes. A previous owner had replaced the doors with walnut-stained oak, leaving the gold-flecked white Formica counters in place.
Still the kitchen suffered from a big shortcoming: its tiny size. It was basically a 4-foot-square of floor space surrounded by cabinets, oversized appliances and barely any counter space. For Opsahl and Russell, who enjoy cooking for friends and neighbors, the claustrophobic dimensions were intolerable.
“You’d bang your head on the cabinets,” Opsahl says, recalling the cramped quarters. “It was awful.”
The kitchen’s best feature was its view of an adjacent family room.
Deciding that the kitchen had to be remodeled, Opsahl set about designing the floor plan and selecting materials.
“I majored in design [in college],” he points out. And while he works mostly with print advertising, he said he believes, with apologies to Gertrude Stein, that: “Design is design is design.”
The first decision was where to put the kitchen. Because he planned on gutting the whole room--meaning that gas, sewer and water lines would have to be replaced and rerouted--there was no economic need to keep the kitchen where it was. The living room was considered, as was the den, both of them offering the possibility of a more spacious kitchen.
But ultimately it was decided that the kitchen would remain in its original location so it would have a view of the backyard and pool. To make it larger, some space would be taken from the adjacent family room. That meant a roomy couch and big television, too large for a downsized family room, would be moved to the den.
With this compromise, Opsahl started sketching the new kitchen. He knew he wanted a big island in the middle with high stools for casual dining. He struggled over whether the sink should go against the wall or in the island. And if in the island, whether it should be hidden by a higher strip of counter “to keep mess and slop and dirty dishes out of view.”
Everything but the Kitchen Sink
The final design placed the sink in the island, which is covered by a flat slab of granite. To fine-tune the design, Opsahl conferred with designers at Ikea, where he purchased the beech cabinets.
Next the couple needed a contractor. Several were rejected, including one who came to look at the old kitchen and said, upon leaving, “Now, how do I get out of here?” Opsahl recalls thinking that such lack of spatial awareness “was not a good sign.”
Another contractor, Russell says, “had no imagination whatsoever. You look to a contractor to be a problem solver.”
They found this in T.A. Russell Contractors in Glendora, whom Opsahl had read about in a previous Pardon Our Dust article in The Times.
Demolition on the four-month remodel began in June 1998 with careful removal of the old cabinets, which now hang in the garage for extra storage. Then, the whole kitchen was taken down to the studs and the bare concrete floor. The slatted wood ceiling, an Eichler home feature, remained intact.
As the new kitchen went in, several hurdles arose. A row of cabinets along one wall was too deep, so the contractor had to trim several inches off the backs. Two appliances were delivered scratched and dented and had to be returned. And one crew member struggled to get the stainless-steel cabinet pulls lined up perfectly.
For Russell, this struggle was a positive sign.
“Another contractor wouldn’t have mentioned it,” he says. “Another contractor wouldn’t have cared.”
And unaligned pulls would have been a disaster for Opsahl, a self-proclaimed perfectionist.
“It would drive him crazy,” Russell explains.
To give the kitchen a simple, modern feel, the couple chose a floor of gray commercial-grade vinyl and sleek, industrial-looking stainless-steel appliances. They included an arched exhaust hood, a GE Monogram, over the Bosch cooktop. Once the hood was installed, Russell came up with his one creative contribution to the project: the idea of repeating that arch in a granite splash behind the cooktop.
In the end, the owners believe the planning and $30,000 that went into the new kitchen were wise investments. First, as Russell points out, the kitchen is now “the focal point of the house.”
And the couple is likely to be in the house for many years and, with luck, grow old there.
“We’ll always keep this house,” Opsahl says. “We’ll probably never move.”
Kathy Price-Robinson is a freelance writer who has written about remodeling for 10 years. She can be reached at kathyprice@aol.com.
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Source Book
Project: Gut and redo kitchen in 1962 Eichler home
Designer: Craig Opsahl
Plan rendering and cabinets: Ikea, Tustin, (714) 838-4000
General contractor: T.A. Russell, Glendora, (626) 963-4048
Major appliances: Expo Design Center, San Diego, (858) 596-9600
Flooring: Direct Carpet One, Orange, (714) 997-0990
Granite counter tops: AGMD, Vista, (760) 941-1556
Cabinet pulls: Home Depot, Orange
Duration: 4 months
Cost: $30,000
