>> it was an exciting event for those who wanted some long needed improvements. >> they saw it and they took care of it. >> the project is expected to open in spring, 2013. for more on the playground, includud

>> there are kids and families ever were. it is really an extraordinary playground. it has got a little something for everyone. it is aesthetically billion. it is completely accessible. you can see how excited people are for this playground. it is very special. >> on opening day in the brand- new helen diller playground at north park, children can be seen swinging, gliding, swinging, exploring, digging, hanging, jumping, and even making drumming sounds.

this major renovation was possible with the generous donation of more than $1.5 million from the mercer fund in honor of san francisco bay area philanthropist helen diller. together with the clean and safe neighborhood parks fund and the city's general fund. >> 4. 3. 2. 1. [applause] >> the playground is broken into three general areas. one for the preschool set, another for older children, and a sand area designed for kids of all ages. unlike the old playground, the new one is accessible to people with disabilities. this brand-new playground has several unique and exciting features. two slides, including one 45- foot super slide with an elevation change of nearly 30 feet. climbing ropes and walls, including one made of granite. 88 suspension bridge.

recycling, traditional swing, plus a therapeutics win for children with disabilities, and even a sand garden with chines and drums. >> it is a visionary $3.5 million world class playground in the heart of san francisco. this is just really a big, community win and a celebration for us all. >> to learn more about the helen diller playground in dolores park, go to sfrecpark.org.

>> it's a pleasure to welcome you all here to b.s.c.. b.s.c. is the culinary store across the street from the department of building inspection and we're here for our brown bag lunch where we're going to talk about home kitchen remodel. i want to introduce andre roth bat. he specializes in residential remodel work as far as i know and is a real kitchen expert

and rachel whiting is a good friend who is going to cook today. shem has a blog called a kitchen of her own.blog spot.com and for the first time in her life rachel has her own kitchen. what is that like? >> it's fantastic the it's really tiny like a lot of san francisco kitchens. but it's going to have a stove and oven which i love. >> no remodeling, in the works? >> not yet, no. >> a lot of people have their own kitchen and want it to reflect their own needs and used -- uses and desires and a lot of other things in their life. what drives people, andre, to want to remodel their kitchen? >> there's lots of reasons. really kitchens have become the most important room in the house and people use it as a means to express themselves.

they use it for investment purposes and kind of become a status symbol. people want really handsome kitchens that reflect and express their own personal style. >> i see a lot of people come into the building department with dreams of renovating their house so that it's a palatial kitchen and often they have to be brought down to some kind of reasonable level in terms of the cost and the realities of it. is that what happens typically for you when you look at people's anticipated kitchen? >> well, it all depends. it depends on what i -- when i get to meet with them. if i get to meet with them early on, i can give them a reality check. but san francisco is a very expensive city for construction. i read that it's the second most expensive city in the country for construction, second only to manhattan in new york. so you have to be realistic.

but if you have a design professional working with you we usually can meet most of our -- your goals and budgets. >> and i just want to emphasize to everybody, work mcgahee design professional, as you know if you've been watching our brown bag lunches, working with a design professional or an act dr. architect or engineer, someone who is trained and knows what's going on, it will be in your best interests. a lot of people say it's a kitchen, i'll use it, i'll figure it out myselfful to be successful you typically do need somebody who has a broader range of understanding the what would make it successful? >> well, obviously, you know, good planning. it's also investigating the existing conditions so you can anticipate problems. for instance, people will place a sink there or a stove there, not realizing we have to put ducts and pipes so if you know, you know, early on that there

is a beam there and we can't do it and we know that from the onset we can work around it. >> but successful means at the end of the project it has met your goals, you're satisfied, you're happy, it hasn't exceeded your budget by more than twice? >> absolutely. >> it hasn't taken more than twice as long as you imagined, right? >> yeah, the whole kind of purpose of working with an architect or designer is to you can in a graphic sense anticipate the conflicts. you can locate your appliances, you can negotiate with all the windows and doors and beams, you can do your lightings, your tile patterns and anticipate any conflicts on paper before you start. so the more drawings that you do, the less problems you have during construction. >> right. and actually in san francisco we see so many people start a project and then they come in for a permit revision because

when they started the work they found that there was something that they hadn't anticipated. they opened up a wall and oh, my god, there's plumbing in that wall. we had no idea. how -- now we can't just remove the wall. or there's dry rot everywhere or who knows what. so the fewer of foes you have to do, and believe me nobody wants to do a permit revision, your contractor doesn't want that because it slows down the project and the contractor wants it to go fast and smooth so he can move on to the next project the we certainly don't want to see any permit revision. let's take a little quick change here. i want to have rachel tell us about gugere. >> we're going to quickly demonstrate a recipe for the tartine cookbook. tartine may have the most

wonderful of items, gougere, a savory french pastry. i like eating lots of them hot out of the oven with champagne. but you may have your own preference. >> ours will even look better than these. >> bite-size treats made with grewaire -- gruyere cheese. >> this very s it's started with a cup and a quarter of milk. for some reason low-fat milk is specified, though i use various kinds with fantastic effects. so we boil together a cup and a quarter of milk with 10 tablespoons of but ther. -- butter. >> ooh. >> that's a stick and i little bit. >> that's a lot of butter, isn't it? >> that's why these are fun.

>> what kind of butter? >> is it unsalted? >> i use unsalted for this so i can control the salt level although they're really delicious salty with champagne. and for this i like to use a really nice quality butter because there's so much butter, you're going to taste it. it's not a small element of the recipe, it's a large element. so use the highest quality. european butters or european style bulleters are fun. there's a -- butters are fun. sierra cheese company actually makes a cultured but theter -- butter that's delicious. >> this is strauss. a european butter. i'm going to pass this around. if you were to have the kitchen of your dreams, what kind of kitchen would that be? >> i love that i have a wall of ovens behind me. this is fantastic. lots of times i wish i had double ofins.

i've lived in houses with them before and miss them terribly now. right now i have a very old vintage stoveg with a proofing oven beside it. >> what is a proofing oven? >> it's so old it's not highly temperature controlled but it's an oven you can put yeast products in to raise. so if you're making yeast bread, i have a place in my kitchen to make that. but with my modern urban lifestyle, i'll make gougere but probably not bread. >> it's like why would you make wine here? san francisco has the best. >> this has come to a boil now. i'm going to incorporate the flour here and it will thicken up and good towards lumpy. but we're fine.

sob the next step here, and this is kind of -- >> it's liked mashed potatoes. yeah. >> it has so much butter in it, it will probably taste great. >> andre, when you work with your clients about their kitchen needs do you ever see them cooking in their house? >> no. we interview them on their cooking styles and whether they stir-fry or use a stovetop or bake and do they cook with their partner and is there a division labor? we kind of do an inventory of their pots and pans and appliances as well. >> which is an interesting thing about who does the cooking? i did a little bit of web research the other day which talked about the differences of the way people cook today and in the 1950's and earlier 1960's when a lot of the older

kitchens that we live in were done and most of the -- and the most efficient kitchens designed in the 1950's were based on the fact that women were home cooking. they cooked from ingredients. they cooked from scratch. they typically worked alone. and they needed a relatively limited number of ingreed yefpblets and of course none of those things seem to be true today. is that your experience? >> absolutely. it's completely changed. the obvious change 50 years ago where kitchens were single rooms, usually small and separate, so now they're bigger and they're always open to something. so frequently almost every single one of my kitchen remodels we're opening up walls to combine a kitchen into a dining or living room. now everyone is in the kitchen the if there's a party, people are there while you're preparing and appliances are more numerous and counters, now we have home offices and tv's

and computers in the kitchen as well so it's really the home center. >> right. i was just at a neighbor's house on second avenue who had just finished taking out the wall between the traditional sort of victorian living room and the tiny kitchen and now they had this large space and it was a revelation to them. they said why didn't we do this many years ago? because the kitchen was part of the lifestyle of the home and it was decide -- divided. they were so happy. >> the problem is you still want to have the kitchen defined. >> what do you mean defined? >> a lot of teems kitchens immediate into other rooms. they're like run-on sentences where you kind -- cuned of don't know where it goes so you still want to have kind of some definition the you can do that with the floor material, the cainetry, or floor plan so it they're visual. >> one of the things, i lived

in japan many years ago, one thing they do is reflect the floor plan in the ceiling plan as the way they define the edges of many rooms. you'd see the ceiling change at the edge -- edge of the kitchen. we don't odo that as much in the united states. maybe we should. ok, do we have any comments or questions? yes, sir. >> is there still a magic triangle number? is that still in use? is it an outdated concept? >> it's known when you do a layout, connect the dots between the sink, refrigerator, and stove, and it should form a triangle. obviously there's a relationship in that they should be close and adjacent, but they shouldn't be too close, so you still need space around there. when you take your floor plan, you draw a point between the sink, the stove, and the

refrigerator and it forms a triangle. >> why is you don't carry stuff to the other side of the room, dripping? >> it's an exercise to make sure you've got good adjaysencies and it's kind of a general rule. each kitchen is different. but that's a good way. you don't want everything focused on one corner, you want it distributed, you want to think about huh to go from the sink to the stove. >> my dream kitchen is going to have a pantry refrigerator and a drawer refrigerator for high-use things. >> a drawer refrigerator, what would you put in there in milk and eggs? >> milk and eggs and cheese, butter. >> i don't understand why you'd do that? why would you want to not have just a regular refrigerator? >> my refrigerator usually has so much stuff in it that i want to have a handy -- >> so you'd have a refrigerator

next to where your cook stove is. >> uh-huh. >> an update on the gougere butter, it's nice and yellow because i've incorporated five eggings, i'm using a little bit more cheese, about a cup of a cheese. usually cheese is grated, mine is in tiny cubes because i like the hunks of cheese, but if you want to do it the traditional way, grate it. >> lots of flexibility. that's great. >> i have incorporated the cheese and now it's lumpy. my next step is going to, and i'll demonstrate it for you. >> so one of the things we can look at is how much counter space do you need to look? >> i need about 30 feet. >> she needs about 30 feet and she's got it here, which is nice. but i go to people's homes and i cook with them, there's never

enough counter space. part of the problem is, it may be designing the counter space, but they put all their junk on it. we know, get the stuff off the counters and you really do need, this is a nice size work station right here. that's a single person's work station. but that's a minimum size single person's work station. if you were actually designing a kitchen, tell us how much counter space you'd think you'd need? >> as much as you can get. there's such a broad range for kitching, -- kitchens, you want to be efficient. if you do an inventory of your appliances and pots so you have a home for them so they're not on the countertops, so now also things like microwaves were flinesd countertops, now they're built in. we have appliance garages, if you have a place for it, you can clear up the clutter. >> another way to do that, having more counterspace, use movable, portable, or island

types of working surfaces. back to rachel. >> my ideal kitchen will have room for my giant cookbook collection, i have twobal 200 new and vintage cookbooks and a place for a computer because in spite of all the cookbooks, half the time i look up recipes on the computer. >> we are in a technological transformation period of the history of human culture. we are just at the beginning of that, actually. this is sort of an interesting thing where we are doing things by hand. we are making gougere by hand, using maybe a recipe from a book that was printed, and there's all this technology transfer into the way the book was printed, it's -- we're sort of halfway modern technology and halfway -- >> and i forgot the book today so i pulled the recipe off the internet on my way here. >> so what will it be like in a hundred years? you'll type in, make gougere

and open the oven and it will be there >> like the jettisons. >> that's right. -- the jetsons. >> that's right. >> we are making four half sheets of gougere. this is a common thing you can buy in bakeries in france, in my experience. >> it's hard to find good ones, though. if you're looking for gougere, go to partine's. not necessarily all the way to france. >> how many of you actually like, enjoy cooking? is this a big thing for you guys? some of you cook for survival. we have some survival cookers. when you're talking clients, you're asking them about what their cooking and eating styles are. >> absolutely. people that are foodies that, you know, have special requirements and you know, sometimes we put, you know double stoves, double

refrigerators, double dish washers, but there's also a bunch of new types of appliances, we install steamers a lot and -- >> i saw a deep fat frier out here that is incorporated, we'll see it when we take a walk. is that cool? what is this? >> treshtime. -- fresh thyme. it says use fresh time or pepper, i'm going to -- fresh thyme or pepper, i'm going to do a batch with thyme. >> foodies always want professional-level appliances, that's a trend now. it's high b.t.u.'s, vikings, then high-powered hoods and things like that. the commercial look is very in right now. >> you say it's a look, i agree it's a look. but i'm a foodie and i'm a cook and i have in my house a stove

that i bought and it -- it wasn't the look. it simply didn't put out enough b.t.u.'s to cook. it wasn't enough. there's more to it than looking professional. >> of course, of course. it acts it, as well. >> taking great umbrage. no, no. there's a real need. if we turn one of these burners on here, see if we can turn something on. that's enough for cooking at home, for some people. that 15,000 b.t.u.'s. >> what do you have at your house? >> it's a little over 20,000 now about what it takes to do a little wok cooking. >> is that 20,000 b.t.u.'s or $20,000? >> both. so the people who eat for survival don't need 22,000 b.t.u. burners. they need a microwave. >> i have to say, my grandmother was the greatest cook in the world, she wrote a

cookbook, taught cooking classes, she had the simplest little stove and kitchen in the sunset district, she taught me, to be a good cook, you need a good heart and a sharp knife. so you don't need b.t.u.'s in my opinion. >> i'm going to add double oven. >> rachel added a double oven. to meet your kitchen remodel expectations, it is not necessary in all cases to completely redo your kitchen. i have seen many kitchens that have been successfully done by doing things like replacing the facings on the cabinets and repainting. and changing the countertops. and maybe changing out one appliance or more. it is not always necessary to go in and strip the thing down to the bare studs and start over again. and part of what a design professional can do is help you understand where you need to be

on this continuum of sweeping the floor to replacing the whole building. in many, many cases, it is simple to do a tremendous appearance upgrade without tearing the whole thing apart. >> cosmetic redos can be very powerful and very affordable. if you have a good kitchen layout, you can do minor a-- improvements and cosmetic improvements, absolutely. >> this is not an all or nothing thing at all. we are now going to take a stroll around, look at different kitchen layouts and why different people might want those lie leyouts and what their advantages are and what the differences might be in sort of expectations. i don't think we're going to look at low end vs. high end. there really aren't low end products here but you get the concept of what's easyier, simpler setup.

rachel is going to keep cooking and when we come back, we'll seat them. we're in one of the little -- many little display kitchens here. this would have been an original window that someone has chosen to put a little greenhouse window in. s that building adecision that means that additional planning review requirements and costs involved. this is a big thing when you go outside the envelope. typically when you do the inside of a kitchen, if you're not remove anything walls or changing the walls, you don't need to do a plan. you need a permit from the building department for the building and you need an electrical permit and plumbing permit but you do not need to bring in a set of plans. but if you're going to be taking out walls and structural or nonstructural walls, we need to see a set of plans of what's existing and what's proposed. and you prepare them, right? >> absolutely. you want to do the entire floor

plan of your house, showing the adjacent rooms, you should do a site plan which would locate the house, where it is relative to the property lines. that's important. and what's above and what's below it, if you're in a condominium, as well. >> and there's something else about what's above and below. if the residential building you are in buzz built after 1974, it is required to have sound separation between dwelling units, either above you or below you. and next to you. and so if you're redoing a question in one of these buildings built after 1974, it may have restrictions on what kind of flooring you can put down so the impact sound is not transmitted to the unit below, or vice versa, or the unit above if you're cutting holes to put recessed cans or something in, you might be penetrating some sound barriers. this is a big deesm there are so many little details, i

wantry kacies of the code, -- -- intricacies of the code, so you need a plan. this is a pretty basic layout, right? >> sink, cooking equipment, microwave, hood. >> i've never seen a kitchen without a refrigerator. >> in this particular case, the refrigerator would be in another room or the other side of the doorway. primarily what you're looking at is a traditional 30-inch range, very standard. has the controls on top. a microwave and ventilation. >> you can't put a hood above a range unless it is specifically listed by the manufacturer to allow it to be used over a range. residential ranges do not need to have hoods. there's no requirement in the code for that, though it sure is a good idea. the standard is