Kitchen Progress

Our kitchen renovation started this week, but before I get into that, I thought I’d show you some before pictures of the kitchen.  These are all iphone pics (cause I’m too lazy to get my real camera and take pictures), so the quality isn’t top notch.

This is the foyer area.  Several weeks ago, when Tim and I were still thinking we could re-do the floors ourselves, we started removing the linoleum.  We quickly realized the job was beyond our abilities and we quit, so our foyer has looked like this ever since.

Nice, huh.

Here’s another angle, standing in our living room and looking at our front door.  I did paint the walls, the trim, the door, and those iron rails (they were black) so besides the floor part, the foyer is looking much better than when we moved in.

This was the view standing in the foyer, looking into the kitchen. 

Look at those floors!

The eati-in area.

 

A few weeks ago, in a last ditch attempt to save money and not have to do a complete reno, I tried one last time to salvage the kitchen and I started painting the cabinets, but in the end, I realized again that they really just weren’t worth saving.  So my kitchen looked like this for several weeks…. half painted, ripped up floors, and missing cabinet doors.  It was chaos.

Which brings us up to the kitchen renovation. 

The guys showed up bright and early on Wednesday morning and got right down to work.

By lunch time, my yard looked like this and there was a thin layer of dust over every surface inside my house. The joys of renovation!!

 

That night, this was the state of our kitchen.

In the above picture, you can see that the entire wall (on the right) isn’t made of bricks and that there are cinder blocks behind where the wall oven used to be. This kinda presents an issue because the cinder blocks will be visible now with our new cabinets. So instead of using the bricks as our backsplash behind the oven wall, we will probably have to use subway tile on that side (as well as on the sink side). We’ll see… Anybody have any other ideas?

They had also already begun laying the wood floors.  The color of the wood floors would not have been my top pick (if I was choosing whatever I wanted) , but it matches almost perfectly with the rest of the house, and I wanted to keep the wood consistent throughout, especially since the floors will run right into each other.  They look really good and so much better than the half ripped up linoleum floors!!

On Thursday, the crew pretty much finished up the rest of the floors and on Friday my cabinets arrived and they began installing them.

These guys are really hard workers and the renovation is going faster than I had hoped.  The cabinets are already installed (but no sneak peek yet!) and the next big thing is the countertops.  And since we are using Ikea’s Numerar butcher block, Tim and I are doing that part. I hope to be back soon with a post about the countertops and also one about some of the smaller details of the renovation process. 

Have a happy weekend!