Kitchen Remodels for Bernal Heights Cottages and Additions

PineWood Cabinets designs, builds and installs custom kitchens and cabinetry for Bernal Heights homeowners remodeling Victorian and early-1900s cottages and the rear additions that so many of them have gained. Every cabinet is built and finished in our Rocklin, Placer County workshop and delivered shop-finished, and our own crew makes the roughly two-hour drive to San Francisco to measure, plan the carry and install.

Bernal Heights is the hill south of the Mission, bounded roughly by Mission Street on the west, Cesar Chavez Street and Precita Park on the north and the freeway on the east, with the open grassy summit of Bernal Hill in the middle. It was settled as a working neighborhood, and its housing shows it: small Victorian cottages and flats from the late 1800s, simple early-1900s houses built in the years after the 1906 earthquake, and a scattering of later infill, all on narrow lots along steep streets, some of them so narrow and steep that they are effectively one-way or end in stairs. Cortland Avenue runs along the south side as the village main street, Precita Park anchors the north slope and Holly Park sits on the south.

The cottages were built small, and a century of families has pushed them outward. Rear additions are the Bernal Heights signature: a kitchen extended toward the garden, a family room added below, a second story set back from the street. The kitchen is usually the room that moved. In the unaltered cottages it is a small square room at the back; in the extended ones it sits in or opens into the addition, with a change in ceiling height or floor level where the old house meets the new. Almost every project we see here is about making a compact kitchen work harder and tying it cleanly to the room beside it.

The hill decides how the cabinetry arrives. Streets are steep and narrow, many have no driveways, and a cottage can sit a full flight above the sidewalk or down a side passage. We measure every stair, passage and door between the curb and the kitchen, build the cabinetry in modules sized to pass through them, and schedule delivery so the crew carries and sets it the same day.

The building permit for a Bernal Heights kitchen remodel comes from the San Francisco Department of Building Inspection. Work that changes the exterior, and especially a rear addition or an enlarged opening to the garden, can also go through Planning Department review, as can work on a building the city considers a historic resource; interior cabinetry and finish work within the existing footprint generally does not. Moving walls, gas or plumbing moves the project into a fuller permit. Where the kitchen is part of a larger addition, we coordinate with your architect or builder so the cabinetry drawings fit the permitted plans. We identify which path a design falls into before the drawings are finished.

Bernal Heights sits east of Twin Peaks and south of the Mission, so it shares the Mission’s sunnier, warmer microclimate rather than the fog of the west side. The air is still cool and marine, winters are wet, and a rear kitchen on a narrow lot may see only an hour or two of direct sun, so wood moves less here than in our hot, dry home valley but finishes still have to cope with damp. We build frame-and-panel doors so panels can float, favor stable species such as painted maple, white oak and walnut, and apply catalyzed finishes in our Rocklin finishing facility so every face arrives sealed. A shop finish also means no solvent fumes in a small house where the kitchen is a few steps from every other room.

The better light gives the palette some range. A rear kitchen that gets the afternoon sun can carry stained oak or a walnut peninsula, while a shaded one still benefits from light paint, open shelving and a glazed upper or two that bounce the daylight from the garden window.