Installing A Stainless Steel Range Hood

You guys know that I will always prioritize keeping the original features of our 1960s home—but sometimes there are exceptions to that rule. Those moments are few and far between, of course, because we truly cherish all of the special little retro details in our brick ranch, but occasionally we’re faced with a situation that simply can’t be helped.

Case in point: the range hood in our kitchen. We’ve made lots of changes to our mid-century kitchen, like painting the cabinets, putting in new quartz counters, and updating the appliances, but we thought we’d try leaving the range hood as is because it was pretty special. At least visually, it was. I loved the warmth the bronze finish gave our largely white and cream-colored kitchen, and the swanky mid-century font on the appliance added cool flair to the space. Unfortunately, that’s where the “cool” factor ended.

Once you got up close, the range hood was functionally shot. We almost exclusively cook from home, and make breakfast, lunch, and dinner from scratch nearly every day, so the hood sees a lot of use. The 60-some-year-old appliance was caked with grease and oil, and no matter how hard we scrubbed, it just never got truly clean. The hood was utterly exhausted. We lived with it for as long as we could, but those pictures above show how the grease had started dripping down the tiles and even onto the pots and pans sitting on the stove top. John and I went from “living with it,” to absolutely desperate to replace the hood so that we could get back to a state of cleanliness in our beloved kitchen.

You may remember that we replaced our electric oven last fall. Since we chose one with a stainless finish, we decided to get a stainless range hood to match it. We chose this one from Lowe’s and had it delivered to our house, then I asked my dad to come help us install it. Luckily, I don’t have much to say about the installation! It went really well, and we simply followed the instructions. We chose a “convertible” range hood since that gave us a little flexibility with the hook-up. There were multiple panels on the hood that we could pop off depending on our vent situation, and we were able to find one that was almost a perfect fit. The hood sits out a tiny bit from the wall in order to capture our existing ductwork, but you can’t see that unless you bend down and look underneath. We’re talking less than a 1/4-inch, so I can live with that.

The only other customization that I had to do after that focused on the area below the hood. Our new one wasn’t quite as tall as our old hood, so we were left with a 4-inch gap between the top of the tile backsplash and the bottom of the new hood. There were also a couple of unpainted sections of the cabinets now exposed on either side of the oven.

To fix that, I chipped out all of the uneven tile and grout along the top row that had been stuffed behind the old range hood, then I cut a piece of wood to fill the gap along the back of the wall. Next, I nailed the board to the wall, and caulked along the edges to make it look seamless. Finally, I painted the new trim piece and the raw sides of the cabinets to match the paint in the rest of the room. Now I think it’s hardly noticeable that the tile doesn’t go all the way up to the back bottom edge of our new range hood.

The new hood isn’t quite as “mid-century” as our old one, but there was simply no saving the original one after more than six decades of use. We love the sleek look of the new stainless hood, and, more importantly, it works so much better! Cooking fumes and smoke are instantly sucked up and out of the house, and the work light is significantly brighter than what was in the old hood. The only problem with that is we’re so much more aware of spots and crumbs on our stovetop and counters now. But we can live with that. I’m glad we made this update, even if it was a little bittersweet. What do you think?

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