The Kitchen Reveal

The kitchen is done!  (Well, except for a few minor paint touch ups that I still have to do, but I’m not counting that!)


Before I give you the grand tour, let’s take a quick look back at where we came from so you can fully appreciate the transformation.
Looking in from the dining room.  Remember those dark red bricks and linoleum floors!?



And here’s the opposite direction with a look at the lovely wallpaper.



The sink side. More wallpaper.



The oven side. More red bricks.


As you probably remember, we initially attempted to do some of the renovating ourselves, but quickly realized we were in way over our heads.  So we waved the white flag of surrender and called in the professionals to get the job done.  Their part of the reno was the demolition and removal of everything (it was a complete gut job!), install new wood floors and baseboards, install new cabinets, and hook-up the appliances.  Our part was staining and applying Waterlox to the butcher block countertops, cutting and installing them, painting the walls and the ceiling, and putting up the subway tile backsplash.  They were done with their part in about 10 days.  It took Tim and I quite a bit longer to get our part finished.  But we’re finally done!
Here is the new view looking in from the dining room.  I love the white washed bricks.  It makes it so much lighter and brighter!



After much thought and deliberation, we decided to put the microwave at the coffee bar.  It’s especially convenient for heating up my coffee and the kid’s food at meal times and it keeps the microwave from taking up any of my very limited counter space.



Plenty of cups for company!






And here’s the view into the kitchen from the table and coffee bar area.



We’ll start with the sink side.
For the upper cabinets, I wanted some to have regular doors, some with glass doors, and some with just open shelves.  Down below, we moved the dishwasher to the right side of the sink (because I’m right handed) and we chose to have a few base three drawer cabinets instead of having all base door cabinets.


Pudge has claimed my new kitchen rug for himself.









Now on to the stove side. 
The day after we had settled on our renovation plan, signed the paperwork, and cut our first check, I read a blog on someone else’s kitchen renovation and she said that her favorite thing she did was enclose her refrigerator to give it a more built-in look.  And immediately I regretted not asking for ours to be enclosed.  So I made a few fast emails back and forth with our project coordinator and got that remedied.  And I’m so glad that I did.  It definitely changes the look and feel of the space.  Our refrigerator (that we inherited with the house) is a smaller/shorter refrigerator than normal, so we made sure to leave extra space around it for when we upgrade to a regular size fridge in the future.



It’s so nice to be finally done with the renovation and settled a little bit more into this house.  Slowly, but surely we are making this place feel more like home!

Farmhouse Sink : Ikea Domsjo Double Bowl
Butcher block counter tops : Ikea Numerar Oak
Countertop stain : Minwax Special Walnut #224
Faucet : Danze
Oven : NXR
Range Hood : Broan
Cabinet Pulls and Knobs : Restoration Hardware
Rug : Target
Paint : Behr Silver Drop

Kitchen progress… the little details

Going into this kitchen renovation, I knew the major things that I wanted… white shaker cabinets, butcher block countertops, and a farmhouse sink.  But when it came down to the smaller details like which faucet style or what kind of range hood, I hadn’t given it much thought and I really had no idea what I wanted.  I guess I initially thought that those little things wouldn’t matter too much as long as I got the big things right.  But through this process, I’ve realized that those little details do matter and they make a big difference in the final outcome of your kitchen.  It could kind of be compared to putting on jewelry after you’ve put on your clothes.  The jewelry you choose can possibly make or break your outfit.  Your jewelry can be really elegant or it can be very simple and understated or it can just look cheap or even thoughtless.  But in the end, what you pick does matter in your overall look.

So since I was pretty much clueless about what I wanted, I had to do a lot of research to really nail down what I liked when it came to these things.  I’ve spent the last few weeks searching Pinterest and reading kitchen renovation blogs to see what’s out there, what others recommend, what I think looks good, and what doesn’t.

In the end, here are the things we’ve decided on:

 

I really wanted a bridge faucet, but since we only have one faucet hole to work with, I decided on the Danze Single Handle Bar Faucet.  I wavered back and forth between a chrome finish or stainless steel. But in the end, I went with chrome, because I wanted it to have a little bling to it.  I mean it you’re going to have a nice faucet, it might as well shine and make that farmhouse sink look extra pretty.  And I also realized that every pin on Pinterest in which I liked the faucet, was a chrome faucet.  Gotta go with what you love.

 

We ended up returning our Ikea 36” range for the NXR 30" Pro-Style Gas Range.  A detail that we had overlooked was that the Ikea range took a 240 watt outlet and our outlets are the typical 120 watts and we didn’t want to add any extra electrical work than was necessary.  Plus I really didn’t need the larger 36” range with six burners.  A 30” range with four burners will be plenty big for our family and it will also allow me to have those extra 6” in counter space and cabinets.

And I love the look of this one better anyway.

 

Plus, look, it’s blue inside!

 

When it came to the range hood, at first I really didn’t have much of an opinion, but in an effort to make an informed decision and to make sure I would be happy with my choice for the long term, I did my Pinterest research.

I do like the big range hoods like this

via the inspired home

But, for whatever reason, Tim wasn’t much of a fan. 

And we are going to have cabinets on both sides or our hood, so ours would look more similar to this (below picture) and neither of us really loved how that looked.

via here

But when we came across this next picture, we both immediately agreed that we loved the look and that it would work well in our kitchen.

via here

The above range hood is a Viking and runs upwards of $1000, so we settled on this much more affordable, but nearly identical, Broan Pro-Style Range Hood in Stainless Steel.

I’m still in the decision making process when it comes to pulls and knobs.  I’ve already bought these from Restoration Hardware.  I love the pulls, but I’m not in love with the knobs and they may get returned.  I kinda want to do something a little more fun with the knobs.

 

 

I love what The Inspired Room did in her kitchen.  If you look closely, you can see that the top knobs are different from the bottom knobs.  It’s fun and unexpected, a little bit quirky and I’m really liking it. 

 

At this point, we’re still in the process of cutting and installing the butcher block counter tops.  Cutting them has been really nerve-wracking.  We measure, measure, measure, hold our breath, and then Tim cuts.  We still have two more to cut.  I’ll be excited when this part is over.  It’s too stressful for me (and I’m not even the one with the saw!).

Once it’s done and they’re installed, I hope to be back with a blog post about it.

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!

 

Kitchen Buffet / Coffee Bar

One of the things our kitchen is lacking is storage space.  There’s no pantry and very limited cabinet space.  So as we’ve been planning out our renovation and thinking of ways to make the space that we have more efficient for our family, one of the things we wanted to do was add some additional cabinetry along an unused portion of the wall in the eat-in area of the kitchen. 
We originally planned for it to look something like this picture below and then we wanted to add some open shelves up above the cabinets.



The extra cabinets would give us a place to store snacks as well as a convenient place to keep art and school supplies for the kids (since the kitchen table tends to be the spot where homework and art projects are done).  I also planned to move my Keurig over to that area and use it as a coffee bar, which would then free up counter space in other parts of the kitchen.
But over the weekend, we came across this vintage sideboard/buffet listed on Craigslist and I knew it would be perfect for our kitchen. And at $145, it was several hundred dollars cheaper than buying the extra cabinets. 
(This picture was taken after we sanded it down.)


I loved that it had both drawers and cabinets.  And it was just the right size for the spot we needed it to go in.  Sometimes God just drops the most unexpected blessings in our laps.
A quick side note: I tried living with the red bricks in the kitchen for as long as I could stand them, but I just couldn’t do it.
Here’s a reminder picture for you of what we started with.
 

All the dark red bricks just sucked the light right out of every inch of the kitchen.  Not to mention, red bricks just don’t fit with the vision I have in my head for my light, bright, white kitchen.  I tried giving the bricks a light gray wash to tone them down, but still wasn’t happy with the result. I kept doing white washes on the bricks until I could look at them and be happy.  I stopped when they were white.  Apparently, white bricks make me happy.
Back to my new buffet…
Usually, when it comes to painting furniture, I go with the “safe” colors. But I knew right away that I wanted to do something bold with this piece. I wanted it to make a statement; to be a fun, slightly unexpected, pop of color in our hopefully soon-to-be white kitchen.
Picking the deepest shade of teal on the color swatch felt a little bit risky to me (like I said, it’s not my usual thing), but I went with my gut and I am so in love with the end result.  The color is Behr’s “Tuscan Teal”.


The finish on the top of the buffet was chipping and peeling when we bought it, so we ended up needing to sand it all the way down to the wood.  I decided to just take that as an opportunity to mix things up a little bit and stain the top instead of just painting it all the same color.  I like the contrast and I think the dark wood goes really well with the teal.
Here’s a peek inside the cabinets and drawers.





Last night, Tim figured out how to hang my shelves up for me.  (Since they were going up on brick, it was a little more difficult.)  These shelves were from our art room at our previous house.  I just put a couple coats of primer and white paint on them to freshen them up.



And this morning, I had some time to play around with the arrangement of everything.






Coffee, anyone?  Come over and have a cup of cheer with me!


I really love the way it all turned out.  It’s so different than the original plan that we had, but I like this so much better. I go in my kitchen just to stare at it.


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