Kitchen, Bathroom and Laundry Closet at 15 West 12th Street

The starting point

The kitchen was a galley in white gloss with a black counter and a black backsplash, and it had two soffits running the length of it, which is the reason the wall cabinets stopped where they did. The appliances were small even for the room: a 24 inch freestanding gas range, an 18 inch dishwasher, a 30 inch fridge. And the apartment circuit breaker panel was inside the cabinet above the refrigerator, which is neither code-compliant nor a place you want to reach in a hurry.

The bathroom had the opposite problem. It was not short of equipment, it was full of it. A steam shower with six body jets, a wooden bench and a glass enclosure, a dropped ceiling with a recessed light sunk over it, mirrored walls, a strip of bulbs above a 24 inch console sink on a banjo counter. The steam generator and a Federal Pacific circuit breaker panel were both sitting in the closet next door.

What the crew did, in order

1. Run the service first

   A new number 4 by 3 BX line was run from the existing metering equipment in the public hallway electrical closet to feed the apartment panel, and the panel itself was moved out of the cabinet above the refrigerator into a new code-compliant position outside the kitchen. Everything downstream of that, the dedicated appliance lines, the GFCI spacing, the laundry, depends on this step, so it goes first.

2. Strip the kitchen

   Out came both soffits, the closet door, jamb and shelving with the opening widened, the floor tile and saddle, the wall and base cabinets, the countertops, the full-height backsplashes and window sill, the sink, p-trap and faucet, the shut-off valves and plumbing branch lines, two ceiling lights with their outlets, switches and plates, and the four appliances. The partition walls were then cleaned up where the soffits and the closet had been.

3. Strip the bathroom

   The dropped ceiling and its recessed light came out over the shower, along with the floor and wall tile, the saddle, the shower lead pan, curb and glass enclosure, the steam shower with its generator and the Federal Pacific panel in the adjacent closet, the console sink and banjo counter, the tank toilet, the surface-mount medicine cabinet, the sconce, the switches and outlet, and every branch line back to the risers.

4. Wire both rooms properly

   Dedicated lines went to the fridge, the over-the-range microwave and the dishwasher, plus two GFCI duplex outlets, with one or two more spliced in so that above-counter outlets sit at the code spacing of every four feet, and an outlet for the range. In the bathroom a new sconce went in, electric was spliced for a lit medicine cabinet with its own outlet wired separately from the switch, and a dedicated line ran from the new panel to a GFCI beside the sink. All wiring to NYC building code.

5. Waterproof and soundproof both floors

   NobleSeal SIS, a combination waterproofing and soundproofing membrane, went down on the prepared concrete subfloor in both rooms, with waterproof membrane on the shower enclosure walls and cement board inside it. A recessed shampoo niche was built into the shower.

6. Narrow the curb to hide the laundry

   The new lead pan and cinderblock curb went in on the shower’s existing footprint but slightly narrower, because a partition wall was built alongside it to conceal the plumbing run to the washer in the adjacent closet. No bench this time. That is the trade the room made: a little shower floor for a washer and dryer in an apartment that did not have one.

7. Tile, then set the stone

   The bathroom took a Nasco Ultra White 12 by 24 in a brick pattern, run to ceiling height in the shower and to about four feet outside it, on a 1/16 inch joint, with a Roca octagon mosaic floor and a black octagon line set into it. The niche is a matte black 3 by 6 with a Cambria Blackpool stone. The kitchen floor is a Daltile Amplify Black 12 by 12. Cambria Brittanicca went on the kitchen counters, the full-height backsplash, the column, the window saddle and the door saddles.

8. Hang the cabinetry and finish

   Executive shaker cabinetry went in to the kitchen design in a custom Sherwin Williams Anew Gray, in 3/4 inch plywood with dovetailed drawers on Blum soft-close runners, wall cabinets to ceiling height and six open maple shelves. The bathroom took a Laurier vanity and two floating shelves in Tuscany Cypress with a vertical grain. Richelieu LED pucks went under the kitchen cabinets on a dimmable supply, the apartment was skim-coated where the walls needed it, and everything was primed and painted.

The kitchen

Taking the soffits out is what changed this room, because it let the wall cabinets run to the ceiling and put the storage back that the soffits had been hiding. The counter, the full-height backsplash, the column and the window saddle are all one material, Cambria Brittanicca, which is why the veining carries around a corner instead of stopping at it. Six open maple shelves sit in the corner where a wall cabinet would have made the galley feel narrower. The range went up from 24 inches to 30, and the fridge came down to a 24 inch Liebherr, which is the swap that bought the range its width.

The bathroom

This is a shower to shower conversion, which sounds like the smallest kind of bathroom job and is not. A steam shower has a generator, a control and a sealed enclosure, and all three had to come out along with the dropped ceiling that hid the first one. What replaced it is a plain thermostatic shower behind a DreamLine sliding door in satin black, with a towel bar on the fixed panel. The vanity and the three offset shelves above the toilet are the same Laurier cypress with a vertical grain, and the floor is a white octagon mosaic with a single black octagon line run through it.

What the two rooms looked like before

MyHome’s own survey frames of the steam shower. They are the only record of the body jets, the bench and the mirrored walls.

Materials and finishes

Kitchen

Bathroom

Laundry closet and apartment wide

The proposal assumed the apartment would be vacant and unfurnished for the duration of the work, and that additional electrical service was available from the public hallway closet on the same floor, as it had been in a previous renovation. Skim-coating was not required and was recommended anyway, both because of the existing wall condition and because of the channelling this scope involved.

The result

More MyHome projects in Manhattan

Questions people ask about removing a steam shower and rebuilding a galley kitchen