Our Kitchen Remodel

I am so excited to share these photos of the beginning of our kitchen transformation. 

If you missed my post about how we bought a fixer upper, you might want to go back Here and see the photos of the ugly house we bought!

While this kitchen does not look horrible- it had a lot of issues.  The cook top and oven did not work, the cupboards were being held closed with velcro, the flooring was curling up and the counter tops were pulling up.  Besides all of that, the layout was weird.  The kitchen sink should have been under the big window looking out over the lake.  The way it was here, the widow over the kitchen sink looked right into a huge evergreen tree and was always covered with bird droppings!

Which is another whole problem with this house because there are birds living in between the wall and the siding - but that will be addressed in another post!

We really  wanted to open up the kitchen and replace the peninsula with an island.

In order to do that and get everything to fit in - we would have to cut down the hot water baseboard heating unit that you see in the photo below.

 We also wanted to change over to a gas stove, so we had to have a gas line run to the kitchen.  So between between moving the sink, shortening the baseboard heater and running the gas line our plumbing bill was quite high.  I haven't mentioned yet - that I acted as the general contractor!!  My husband can do a lot of things, but plumbing is not his forte, besides the fact that he works full time and we are living in the house as we renovate it.  We decided that we would hire out the plumbing and also the install of the cabinets.  The cabinet installers would also take on removing the soffit and installing can lighting.  

We took on the gutting of the kitchen, installing new flooring, new light fixtures other than the can lights, and tiling the backsplash.   

This was the beginning of the demo!  We made many many trips to the dumpster in our driveway with carpet, linoleum, counter tops, old appliances, and some of the trim.  We did salvage a few of the cupboards to use in the garage once we are all done. We set up a make shift kitchen in the basement with a few of the cupboards while we were without a kitchen for months.

Our dogs were often covered with saw dust - then later drywall dust!

This house is on a lake in a bit of a remote area, so there are not a lot of restaurants around, we used the crockpot and the grill a lot!

Unlike those tv shows where it is all done in an hour- realistically it is more like 4 months.  At times it was very frustrating because we were waiting for the plumber or waiting for the counter tops, but for the most part it went pretty smooth.

So now that demo is done, lets move on to the good stuff!

Here is the design we came up with after going back and forth with the kitchen designer at Home Depot.  I am not receiving any compensation from Home Depot - that is just who we used because they had a good sale going on and they had what we were looking for as far as style and price.

Now when you see the completed kitchen - it will vary from this a bit.  The big difference 

in this new kitchen is that we are taking out the window were the old sink was.  We have a huge window on the right that will let plenty of light in.  I hated that window anyway - like I said before, it was always covered with bird crap and there was no way to clean it besides climbing into the kitchen sink and hanging out of the window since it was up on what is essentially the second floor.

After much shopping and hauling samples home, these were the choices we finally agreed on!

Hardwood flooring, solid surface counter tops(the little tiny sort of marbled piece in the middle), cream colored cabinets - with a little distressing ( just because we have two dogs and sometimes you need a little distressing to camouflage some of thier dirt and drooling)  and the scary part - something I wanted to try - two brown cabinets on either side of the stove.  I say scary because we weren't really sure how this was going to look but we knew we wanted to break up all the cream colored cabinets and we thought that this would somehow make our little gas stove look slightly bigger since we did not have the money or space for a big Viking gas stove like you see in all the dream kitchens!

We started with the flooring since this wood was now going throughout the whole floor, extending into the living and dining areas.   One of my happiest moments of this whole process was throwing that berber carpet in the dumpster!!  All of those white boxes piled up on either side of the fireplace are the wood flooring.  It was quite a long process, working on it many evenings, but my husband did a beautiful job.  He could only take it so far until the cupboards were installed and then he went back and completed the kitchen area.

The kitchen installers worked on the dry wall and the can lighting.  This step seemed to take the quite a while, there was a lot of days of mudding and sanding were things didn't seem to change that much.  Finally, our cupboards were installed!!

That's when I could start seeing our vision coming together!

We had to wait three week between measuring for the counter tops and the installation of the counter tops, so that was the longest part of the process.

Is it starting to look like a kitchen now??

It was exciting to see how the new appliances were going to look.

We waited until the kitchen was this far before we decided what kind of backsplash to put in.  We were not really sure how dark or light to go.  So it was back to the stores and bringing home more samples of backsplash tiles until we found what we hoped was the right one.

It is porcelain tile that looks like brick.

We were both very happy with our choice once we got some up on the walls.

Well, this is all just a teaser for the finished kitchen.

Heck, I haven't even mentioned the island yet!  

I will be doing another post that has pictures of the kitchen that is now 99% done.  In that post I will include a list of the type of flooring, tile, counter top and lighting we used.

Thanks for stopping in to see the process!

Let me know if you have any questions and I will try to answer them in my next post.

Ann  

I am linking up to the following parties:

Metamorphosis Monday @ Between Naps on the Porch 

That DIY Party @ DIY Showoff

Amaze Me Monday @ Dwellings- The Heart of Your Home

Inspire Me Tuesday @A Stroll Thru Life

Wow Us Wednesday @ Savvy Southern Style

Feathered Nest Friday @ French Country Cottage

Dishing It and Digging It @ Life and Linda