Command Center

The kitchen featured a desk area common to many homes of this vintage.

I wanted lots of storage for office supplies, files, and paper shredding and recycling.  I didn’t want a desk surface because they always wind up serving as paper dumping grounds in our family.  I usually wind up working at the kitchen table anyway.

After removing the existing desk, I added framing above the old half wall in order to provide more enclosure and a place to hang a bulletin board.  The new command center, as we call it, is comprised of eight Ikea cabinets, using the same door style from the kitchen.  The base and wall cabinets are separated by a Karlby walnut countertop.  It provides some warmth and texture in contrast to the white quartz countertop we selected for the kitchen cabinets.  I left the doors off the middle cabinet in the top row and installed some lighting to brighten up that corner of the kitchen at night.  I added a simple trim detail at the top to finish off the gap between the cabinets and the ceiling.

I added two glass doors because I thought solid white would be too monolithic alongside the vast stretches of white in the rest of the kitchen.  But, I didn’t necessarily want to see what was in the cabinets.  After considering frosting  film and funky wrapping paper inserts (which resulted in too much color), I settled on covering the inside of the doors with pages from some Shakespearean plays I found at 2^nd & Charles for like $5.  It provides some nice texture and won’t conflict with whatever artwork I might display on the top center shelf.

 I decided to use two different kinds of knobs, again to introduce some texture to what could otherwise be a plain-vanilla façade.

The cabinet interiors provide lots of useful storage.  I was able to create a spot for paper recycling and shredding on one side and a file drawer on the other:

The 30” wide drawers feature an additional internal drawer each, which, combined with Ikea’s interior organizers, provides ample storage for small office supplies:

All in all I’m pretty happy with how it turned out and it was definitely one of the faster projects I’ve tackled.