Kitchen: Before and After

Remember this hot mess of a kitchen?

I can't believe I even contemplated leaving it like this and redoing it sometime down the road. When we purchased our home the biggest eye sore of the entire house was the kitchen ... And as we all know everyone loves to hang out in the kitchen! Thankfully one evening back, in November when we were working on the house, I went out to get pizza for everyone and when I came back cabinets were being torn down!

This didn't upset me in the least bit because who doesn't want a brand new kitchen, I just knew that it would set back our move in date .... It was totally worth it. Not to mention we had it made at my in laws house with the entire upstairs to ourselves, so there was really no rush or deadline to be out. Now that the cabinets were down I made it clear that the paneling and the drop ceilings had to go. And so it goes demo was underway.

 Some of the bigger projects that went underway was that we needed to patch up the chimney.

 

We also had to agree on sacrificing some closet space to ultimately gain cabinet space. If you notice in the images above, to the right of the chimney there was a closet. We ended up sheeting rocking right over it. Before the sheet rocking stage we insulated the outside walls of the kitchen. Being an older house we lack insulation everywhere. We also had to hire an electrition to come in and rewire, put in new outlets, and install our recess lighting. My father-in-law also installed new windows. After that Jack and Johnny were able to begin sheeting rocking. I enjoyed watching this. The sheet rock had to be cut to size, outlet holes were cut out and also the lighting holes. My father-in-law did all the taping. The only thing I took part in was mudding the  screw holes.

The next step was to sand everything. Not fun - glad I was medically incapable of taking part in this job!We then primed the kitchen and painted it with a very neutral color because we weren't sure what we wanted and how the colors would look with cabinets. We figured in the future we can paint it again, or add backsplashes.

When the ceilings were being torn down, the linoleum floors got a little banged up and had to be torn out. Before I knew it beautiful hard wood floors were installed.

Now we could begin to design our kitchen and pick out cabinets. This took us a little while. We didn't know what was the best way to go. Origionally we looked at Cabinets at www.cabinetstogo.com. This website offers discounted wood cabinets. They also have a very useful program that they can set you up on to design your own kitchen. I was able to play around on the website to figure out what the best options were for where to place all our cabinets. The difficult thing for us is that we have four doorway openings in our kitchen and almost one wall is taken up by window space. In the end though, we decided to buy our cabinets from Lowes. They were running a great deal. I brought in my layout and we met with a consultant who gave great pointers on how the kitchen should ideally be set up.

In our origional design we wanted to have the fridge built into the cabinets. After a lot of hmmming and haaaaaaaing we decided to move the fridge to the external part of the cabinets. The advantages of doing this was to prevent the fridge door from banging up the cabinets and now we have a lovely magnet board to hang pictures and funny poetry frases on.

 Our next project was to pick out countertops. We went with formica countertops from Lowes. Lowes had a lot more options than home depot. My father-in-law also put new molding everywhere in the kitchen. He matched it to the style of the molding found everywhere else in our house which is old fashion. I appreciated that he preserved the look of our older home. Our last project was hooking up all the appliances and filling our cabinets with food! We needed all new appliances because our house didn't have any. They were delivered before the cabinets and sat in our living room for a little while. It was so nice to finally move them into the kitchen and get them running. I think that is about everything that has been done in the kitchen. Here are the official before and after shots!

Before

 

After

Before

After

After

The last thing our kitchen needs is a little bit more decorating! Oh yeah, and a microwave to go above the stove!