Kitchen Before & After

Our kitchen remodel was started in December 2010. It began with moving the laundry room upstairs and has progressed through modifying the layout by ripping out a couple walls, adding a couple cabinets and replacing or resurfacing, well, almost everything. Most of the work was done in spurts during time Eric took off from work, to, um, work more! I will use the word "we" in a lot of the comments, but please know that my man did most everything himself--sometimes I wonder if it wasn't because he was afraid I would just mess it up. 

Before:  Cooking/Cleaning area all original to the house built in 1991 (except the counter microwave that we needed since the built-in died a few years back--made a great, oversized timer!)

Before:  Food storage area, pantry w/pull-out drawers in cabinet on left, the "pile" counter, fridge.

Before:  Dining area looking into the living room.

During:  Wall between the kitchen & living room ripped out (July '11).  Before view of the sliding glass doors and "extra" back door (that half window to the left of the sliders).

After:  Cooking area with a peek at the bar & window that replaced the sliders.

After:  New bar (now has stools & valance over the window) & broom cabinet.

After:  Close up of backsplash (tile from Heartland Tile & Stone in Raymore, MO) -♥ the mosaic details- & granite (St. Cecilia) inspired by the designer show house I toured in Topeka, KS last spring. 

After:  Close up of our painted & glazed cabinets.  I did all of the cabinet resurfacing using Rustoleum's Cabinet Transformations light kit in Linen.  Hardware in Antique Bronze from Locks & Pulls in Overland Park, Kansas.

After:  View standing by the previously unused backdoor looking into the kitchen.

So there's the nickle tour!  The "After" pictures were taken on Christmas Day 2011, so we've had some time now to live in the space and it's truly been enjoyed by our whole family.  Hope you like what we've done--it was a lot of work and we're still wrapping up the redo of the room that was the original laundry area (through that door to the right of the stove--there is a 1/2 bath and then the room).  It's transforming into a walk-in pantry/utility room full of shelves and purposeful storage---yay!

Shiny New Toys

Our kitchen facelift is slowly moving along amongst all the rest of life. When the heating element went out in the oven about 8 weeks ago, we decided to go ahead with appliances before finishing the cabinets/countertops/backsplash. Yay. So now I need to decide if I'm going to tell you my embarrassing story about appliance shopping. Hmmm...well, of course I am...then it makes it less embarrassing and more just funny.

So I'm really excited to change from a nasty old coil stove to a gas range! I've never cooked on gas before, but that's okay, it's going to be great. From all the pulling out and cleaning behind over the years, I remembered that although our current stove is electric, we have a gas line there ready to be hooked up. Enter hours on Garden Web parusing their appliance forum. Then enter reality and realize I'm not willing to spend $4000 on the stoves they recommend. So the weekend before soccer gets going I dedicate to shopping the boxes: Lowes, Home Depot, and Sears. Sears has the best deals and after much hemming and hawing (and calling all my close friends for their opinions) I make the purchase, have them load it up in the mini and off we go!

Eric slides out the old range and then I hear the holler: "RESA!!! So where's this gas line, Miss "I clean behind the stove so often"?" Uummm...I stare at the single electric cord and massive amount of crumbs...oohhhhh, yeahhhh....shoot!!! That gas line? It was behind the electric DRYER that I had to constantly fish things out from behind in the old laundry room! Sorry hun. Then I got to call Sears: "Um, I'm the lady that's been in three times today and just bought the gas range, um, uh, I need to bring it back because I don't really have a gas line, and, um, uh, will you all please laugh at me now BEFORE I show up?" Sigh. So no gas range for Resa. There could be worse things in this world.



Fast forward another month and wah-lah! I have gone to the mega-box store, Nebraska Furniture Mart, spent 1.5 hours (by myself) and picked out three deliciously new, completely average, midrange appliances. All by GE, all stainless or stainless look. They delivered, my honey has installed all but the microwave, and we're back in business! (See cupcakes baking?) --by the way, PAY someone to install your dishwasher...it was a pain!



The countertop guy has been here to measure, the cabinet dude is working on designing a couple new storage areas, I've picked out the backsplash/sink/faucet/cabinet hardware and we're to call the window guy next week. So here's to some nice fall weather while we rip out the sliding glass door and rebuild the wall...and I get to work painting the cabinets! Whew.

And the Wall Comes Down

Progress. It's a good thing! Already our main living area feels much roomier...the 20 or so square feet behind the kitchen/living room wall has always functioned as, well, not much. Sometimes a kid's play area but most of the time empty and unused! It now has a new lease on life with traffic running smoothly through it each day. It's good to be loved.

Here's how Eric spent his week of vacation...please note that all the parts where I say "we" in reference to work done, it really means "he". :)

First, off comes the drywall:


Halfway down and realizing the building materials used were, ah, crap. The wiring was spliced and then wrapped with tape dangling inside the header. Electrical rerouting probably took the most time as he had to get the wires leading to both the kitchen and living room overhead lights to go flush up into the ceiling and over to the column with the switches.


With the wall down, next up was to tackle the floor. We are going to use the space leading up to the unused back door as our new back entryway when the sliding doors are gone, so we needed to continue the kitchen tile to that door. That meant removing any existing tile that had been trimmed against the old wall. Yay for Dremel tools.


Already we could feel the difference!


We borrowed Jerry's wet saw (thanks!) and he went to work using lots of math for all the angles. I knew there was a good reason to marry a math minor.




And then the grout. I actually am the go-to grout person around here. Makes me feel like I've done something other than stand around looking pretty while he does the dirty work! (I wrote about our adventures when we first put this floor in several years back. Some of it is here.) It's wet in this pic, dries to match the tile.


And here is a picture from this afternoon. I scootched the table over since the grout has cured, though I still need to seal it. What a major difference! The tiny wall space between the doors is almost ready to paint or whatever we're doing. Matching the living room's faux finish might be tricky so I'm hoping to use the golden yellow...hmmm. I'm also going to continue painting all our trim the nice creamy white we started with in the office redo. I'm serious about getting rid of all this golden oak people. To be continued.....

Kitchen Remodel Time!

So it's been a long time coming, but we've finally started on the kitchen! Whoo-hoo! Now, you would think I'd be all over taking some nice before shots...but that would be before I let our "good" camera tumble off a guard rail trying to take a timed picture of our family visiting the Smoky Mountains last week. Sigh. It not working no more. Thankfully, I DO have a couple lesser quality cameras lying around...one w/o a working flash and the other is just plain questionable, but they work in a pinch so here we go!

We'll start with a walking tour of the kitchen. As you come in from the entryway...this wall divides the living room and dining area. [Notes in orange are the future plans! This wall is coming out! We'll leave a small column for the electrical but the rest will be open space. The window you see through the cut out is actually an unused back door that will become our main back entrance.]


A peek in from the living room... [So that perfect spot for my kids' portraits is disappearing.]


Then looking back through the cut out into the living room. There is a sliding glass door on the right behind (to the right in this shot) the table. [And that door is coming out to become a couple of nice large windows with a bar and storage cabinets beneath.]


Turn around and you see the work area...lovely appliances circa 1991 along with the coveted golden oak cabinets and those pulls we all love...creamy ceramic with brass...nice! You may notice double microwaves...I think I've shared before how the built in one has functioned as an oversized timer for quite some time now. It has a little sticky note the says "I don't work" for visitors' convenience. :) Funny how you can't see the bottom of the dishwasher dangling with the packing tape that is no longer holding it flush. I can see it. Right now. Ugh! [Bye, bye golden oak! Bye, Bye laminate countertop! Bye, Bye...well, everything. The appliances will be stainless-look (to avoid fingerprints and water streaks), counters quartz or granite (still working on a color...brownish?), we're painting the cabinets a rich creamy color with a light amount of brown glaze to highlight the raised panels, rubbed bronze pulls, composite sink, and maybe a greenhouse window.]


If you spin around to the other wall you'll see my pantry cabinet, our junk counter (which I was going to clear for the picture, but this is reality people), and the once lovely fridge which I did pick out myself 9.5 years ago. [Same cosmetic redos here. I'm trying to decide on the backsplash, but need to figure out the counters first. Was thinking about accent tiles of the mosaic glass mixed with subway tiles, but keep reading designer blogs and their advice is JUST SAY NO to accents. Hmmm.]


Back on over to the stove wall is the lovely view of the 1/2 bathroom. Nothing like a huge, wide, open door beckoning you to come use the commode while you're making dinner! In a perfect world that door would remain shut...BUT there are little munchkins in this house, so that's a no go so far. [We're shrinking the door frame (it was large to fit in the washer/dryer...but that's a non-issue since the new laundry is upstairs now) to gain about 9 inches. We'll use it to add length to this counter and build a lower cabinet with vertical storage for baking pans and a pull out trash/recycling center...see ya nasty trash can!]


And that's it! Not very big, but it gets the job done. Our goal is to open up some space and do a little rearranging and updating to make it function much better. I think I'll go back to the top and insert in captions of what the plans are...yeah, that will be fun! So up I go...

And I'll be back soon...Eric has been working hard the last couple days so we already have some progress.