Our kitchen is coming along (5 month update)
/Our kitchen was once dark and outdated with old appliances, vinyl floors, and a laminate countertop that was deteriorating before our eyes. The layout just wasn’t practical for our lives and we wanted to make some changes to both form and function. It’s crazy to look back on the before photos and see how far we’ve come. Are we done yet? Nope, but in 5-months I feel like we’ve accomplished so much. Josh and I DIYed 90% of our kitchen, from demo to installing new drywall, building our own kitchen cabinets, installing beautiful herringbone tiles, and more. We hired out for electrical and gas line installation, but everything else was built from hard work and perseverance.
I thought it would be fun to take some of those before photos from 5 months ago and compare side by side what our kitchen looked like before and what it looks like today (in its current unfiltered state). We still have a list of things to do to call our kitchen complete but let’s take a look to see how far we’ve come.
For the most part we kept the layout the same but increased the cabinet height of our uppers and added more storage. We tested so many different shades of blue paint for our cabinet color and both gravitated toward Cyberspace by Sherwin Williams. It’s the perfect shade of blue that has subtle grey undertones at times, depending on how the light hits it.
If you recall, my biggest issue with our old oven was the placement. It felt like such a hazard to have the oven right next to our narrow entry, especially with young kids. To combat that, we swapped the locations of our fridge and oven and doubled the size of the main entryway.
Opening up the kitchen was one the first things we did after demo. Everything just feels so much more spacious and bright. We also decided to go with a panel ready dishwasher, so once we build and install the panel this area of the kitchen will look even more seamless and eliminate having stainless steel appliances overpower this corner.
To cut costs we kept the plumbing in the same location. I’ve always wanted a matte black sink, so choosing this undermount one from Kohler was by far the easiest design decision for our kitchen. The heart knows what it wants. For the faucet, I debated on a pull-down spray vs. side spray and decided on side spray because 1). I like the look of a bridge faucet and side spray and 2). We had a side sprayer before and it never bothered us. We decided to stick with what we know. Old habits I suppose.
I love having this little dedicated cooking corner. We converted to a gas stove and added an island vent hood by Zline. This was a design element I was worried wouldn’t work, but once we installed the vent hood I knew that it would all come together just as I envisioned. When we built the cabinets around the oven we decided to go with a slightly deeper depth (vs. standard cabinet depth of 24”) to give us just a few more inches of cooking space.
It’s funny because the before and after images are both missing doors. I guess some things haven’t changed. We still need to do some paint touch ups along the bottom of the cabinet and also install a few more floor tiles in this area.
I’m seriously obsessed with our marble counters. In the beginning of our kitchen renovation we thought we would go with a quartz countertop, but after looking at different slabs at various stone yards, we fell in love with a marble stone that we couldn’t stop thinking about. We love the idea of having a natural stone in our home (vs. manmade), plus choosing marble over quartz cut down the cost of our countertop significantly. Speaking of cost, I’m working on a budget breakdown of our kitchen, and I think you all will be pleasantly surprised to learn how much our kitchen renovation cost us
Gone are the days of living with 4 types of flooring (before we had cement board, subfloor, vinyl and the mysterious floor that we determined is a soundproofing fiberboard). We now have beautiful porcelain faux brick tiles that look sooo good in the herringbone pattern we chose. Herringbone is taking us forever to install and we of course still need to grout, but it’ll all be worth it in the end.
Say hello to our second entryway. We sold our old bookshelf turned pantry and replaced it with a hutch turned pantry. We’ve placed the hutch here temporarily until we finish installing the floor tile in our bonus room. Then we’ll move it to its new and permanent spot. No more playing musical chairs with our pantry. Now we can enjoy even more light and air and space and and and I just love it all!
As far as next steps go in the kitchen we still need to:
Finish installing floor tile
Grout floor tile
Finish painting cabinet frame / touch ups
Paint and install cabinet doors and drawers
Paint and install side panels for lowers and uppers
Install backsplash tile
Paint and install toe kick
Paint and install crown molding above uppers
Install baseboards
Install shelf over sink
Install light fixture over sink
Exposed beams * (I’m still trying to convince Josh)
Replace trim around arches * (we’re trying to decide if we should replace the trim or keep)
