Kitchen remodeling in La Mesa

La Mesa is twenty to twenty-five minutes from Chula Vista, and its housing stock is a step up in age and character from the tract subdivisions closer to the border. Mid-century single-family neighborhoods dominate, with an older core around the downtown, and the kitchens reflect a period when the room was designed as a workspace separate from where people sat.

Mid-century housing brings a specific opportunity and a specific complication. The opportunity is that these houses often have good bones and generous ceiling heights, so opening a kitchen into the living space produces a dramatic result rather than a marginal one. The complication is that the framing in that period was not standardised the way later tract construction was, so what a wall is carrying has to be looked at rather than assumed from its position on the plan.

The other item worth flagging early is what is above the kitchen ceiling. Mid-century houses frequently have low-slope or flat roof sections, and a low-slope roof over a kitchen limits where a range hood duct can go and how a flush beam can be concealed. Both of those are solvable, and both are considerably cheaper to solve on paper than after the ceiling is open.

The older streets around the downtown are a different proposition again. The houses there predate the mid-century neighborhoods that grew up around them, and their kitchens follow the older pattern: smaller rooms, closed off from the rest of the house, with services that have been added to over decades rather than designed once. Work in that part of the city has more in common with a National City project than with the mid-century streets a mile away.