Kitchen remodeling in National City

National City borders Chula Vista along the Sweetwater channel and is a ten-minute drive from most of western Chula Vista, which makes it natural coverage territory even though the two cities have very little in common architecturally. It is one of the oldest incorporated cities in San Diego County, and the kitchens here show it.

The housing is older and denser than almost anything in Chula Vista. That produces a consistent set of kitchen conditions: small rooms laid out as galleys or L-shapes, a wall between the kitchen and the dining room, upper cabinets stopping below a soffit, and an electrical service that was sized for a house with one small appliance in it. The service panel is the item that most often turns a straightforward-looking cabinet-and-counter project into a larger scope, because a modern kitchen with a dishwasher, a disposal, a microwave and dedicated small-appliance circuits asks considerably more of a panel than the original kitchen did.

The compensating advantage of older housing here is construction type. A great deal of this stock sits on a raised floor over a crawl space rather than on a slab, which makes moving a sink dramatically cheaper than it is in a slab-on-grade house. Where a Chula Vista tract house would need the concrete saw-cut and patched to reroute a drain, a National City bungalow often just needs somebody willing to get under the floor. That single difference can decide whether an island sink is realistic on a given budget.

Older kitchens also frequently have more room than they appear to, because the soffit above the wall cabinets is often carrying nothing but air. Opening one up and running the cabinetry to the ceiling recovers real storage in a small room, and it is one of the highest-value changes available in this housing stock. What is inside the soffit needs to be established first, since ducts and vent stacks do live in some of them.