This post has been a long time coming. There are WAY too many pictures included here. I wanted to document every step of the process and I'm glad I did, you've been forewarned.
When we first moved into our house in August 2013 we knew we didn't love the kitchen. It was closed in and tight. There was counter space and there was cupboard space, but it was a little claustrophobic for me.
This space that little Eliza is skipping through was the worst. If anyone was at the fridge no one could get past. And we hit our heads on the upper cabinets constantly.
Despite the large windows, the kitchen still felt dark somehow. I took these photos below just as we were moving in (as indicated by the extreme mess on the counters and no dining table yet). I think I stood in one place in the middle of the kitchen and snapped pictures going around the whole room.
The previous owner had replaced the old counter top with 12" granite tiles. They were black and the grout lines weren't too big, so it was an improvement from our kitchen in Texas, but it wasn't what we would've chosen. And the sink was black. I'm sure these choices along with the black appliances added to the dark feeling I got in the space.
The view looking into the "formal" dining room, which we used as a pseudo guest room.
The cabinets weren't pretty, but they were fine. Kind of grimy, even after scrubbing.
The cabinet over the fridge was so far back we could hardly reach it even using a big step stool. Then when we placed stuff on the top of the fridge the cabinet became even more unusable.
As you can see no one was really happy in the old kitchen. Man, I had forgotten about what a stinker Baby Abee was.
The formal dining room, looking into the kitchen.
After we'd painted the front room and formal dining room, this gives you a better idea of the space that was pretty much being wasted.
The first thing we did to improve the kitchen was take down the upper cabinet that was across from the fridge. Sometime between December 2013 and March 2014. It made a huge difference in opening up the space to the rest of the house. I no longer felt like I was in a cave when preparing meals. It made the kitchen totally livable.
It felt silly to redo more of it because it was so newly redone already. And we knew we wouldn't live here more than 4 years at the most, so why spend a small fortune to only maybe, possibly recoup our cash?
Enter: The water damage. It was the week of Thanksgiving 2014 and my dishwasher was really acting up. We'd been trying to figure out what was wrong with it for a little over a week, trying something and running a cycle only to see that nothing was working. I realized that it looked like no water at all was getting to the machine, even though I could hear the water running. Finally Ethan pulled the appliance from its location and discovered that one of the connecting hoses had been chewed through in several location by a rodent of some sort. We discovered that the water was never getting to the machine because it was hitting those holes and seeping into the floor. Since we had a laminate floating floor, we never saw any water under our feet, it was all under the laminate. We set our tiny, little rotating fan on the spot for the night and went to bed never dreaming what lay in store.
We called our homeowners insurance in the morning and they sent someone to our house. They pulled up the flooring and discovered...
All those times we'd tried running the dishwasher another cycle we were getting more and more water into our floor and subfloor. It was seeping up into the cabinets and walls. It was not pretty. I was supposed to be hosting Thanksgiving at my house that week and had to call several families to cancel. I couldn't stick around. We ran away to Utah and enjoyed a nice Thanksgiving with family. We ordered new cabinets from Ikea while we were there because it was the end of their 20% off sale. We had decided we were going to move forward with doing the kitchen on our own.
When we got home we were greeted by our "new" kitchen...
Since the water that had been leaking was so warm and it didn't have any room to breath, mold grew pretty quickly and so they had to tear it all our and run fans for drying and a machine that made it so the mold wouldn't be a problem in the air. You can see they had to tear out sheet rock and cabinets.
It was a little scary.
Once the water and mold had been taken care of we were left with this.
So we decided to do what we'd wanted to do from the very beginning... tear down the wall and make the kitchen of our dreams.
Everyone had a lot of fun helping with this part.
I'm not going to lie, though, it was pretty intimidating once we were in this position. We had decided to move forward on our own.
But WOW! What a difference it made tearing down that wall. The space was so much brighter and open. I could tell we were on the right track.
Sheetrock up.
We had help with the mudding, taping, and sanding. But we still put in a lot of hours getting dirty.
Trying to decide on paint colors... I had way too many choices up there, I know.
Trying to make the ceiling look seamless where we took out the wall was a challenge, thankfully we had a friend come help us a lot.
One day we had a whole bunch of people from church come help us, we painted, cleaned, tore out the old flooring in the dining area and formal dining room and front room...
...and got us started on laying the new flooring throughout.
Ethan and I laid the rest of it ourselves. It was a lot of work, but so exciting to see it coming together.
Over the next couple weeks we spent every free moment building Ikea cabinets. I put together so many of those boxes I was a pro. However, Ethan was the pro when it came to installing them.
And the kids were pros at playing in the leftover cardboard. You would not believe the amount of cardboard we had laying around here. It took us forever to finally get all of it hauled away.
I also got really good at the drive to Sacramento's Ikea. Levi and I went one day to return some things tried to make the most of our wait time by taking silly photos.
February 20, 2015 we were finally ready to have our countertop installed!
You can see we were still a construction mess there under the kids' photos, but we were getting closer to being done!
And now that its a year later we have finally managed to finish some of the details that make the space really special! We love our new kitchen and are so happy that we have been able to enjoy it for as long as we have. Most of the after pictures I have here are really dark because I took them late last night or early this morning (you got to take the opportunity while the kitchen is clean!)
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Some of the things I really love...
How open and big it is. Working in the kitchen is (almost) always enjoyable for me, but this large space makes it so much nicer!
My cabinets have some really usable space. I don't have to reach into dark corners anymore to find hard to store items like my big griddle.
And my pots and pans don't have to be all stacked on top of each other anymore. Now I can just grab the one I want without having to go through 14 others first!
The window trim! I love the contrast of the white with the darker blue on the walls. I think it adds so much! And with the blinds closed its even more dramatic.
Using this weird wall space for the kids' portraits was a stroke of inspiration. I don't remember who thought of it, but I'm glad they did! (This is one area that still needs a project or two... we have to reinstall the railing between the family room and dining area).
The cabinet above the fridge is so awesome! I can use that space so much better now and it looks so much tidier!
I also have so much "pantry" space even though I don't really have a pantry. I love these pull out cabinets more than I knew I would.
And having this cabinet with space big enough to hold my 5 gallon buckets of flour, oats, wheat and sugar is so, so great. I also love that I can hide my smaller appliances. Everything has a place in this kitchen.
We all love that we have additional seating now as well. We can seat 8 around our table with no problem (obviously) then we have seating for 4 at the counters, 2 at this window and 2 by the sliding glass door. It is so nice! Plus we have a big space we can put a folding table if we need even more seating. At Thanksgiving this past year we fed a group of 33 (I think?) that would have been impossible in the old kitchen.
Two things about this picture bring a smile to my face. First, I love the glass front cabinet for my "nice" dishes. I don't have a lot of fancy stuff, but its fun to see it peeking out at me like its art. The under cabinet lighting is a fun little addition as well. But what I really, really love is that my front room is now open to the kitchen and I don't have to feel like I'm leaving the party if I have to get something out of the oven.
We are so happy with the new kitchen! I know its going to be hard leaving it, but I sure hope it makes selling our house easier!
