Kitchen Makeover

This past weekend we started remodeling our kitchen. Below are the "before" pictures. I have hated our kitchen since we moved in here 7 1/2 years ago. Our kitchen in Florida was pretty big, and I guess we were spoiled. What we're doing to the kitchen won't alleviate all our problems. The only way to do that would be to take out the wall completely and move the stove (which means moving the gas line) and replace our hard wood floor. So we're going to do the next best thing and give ourselves much more cabinet space and the feeling of more room.

This is looking at our kitchen as you come in from the garage. One of the problems Fred and I have when cooking is that we bump into each other around the stove and island. I realize that there are worse problems to have. After all, not every wife takes the role of sous chef at dinner time so her husband do the bulk of the cooking. The basic layout here will stay the same, but everything will be replaced (except the appliances).

This is our barely-used dining room. The table was my grandmother's, the desk was my dad's and the china cabinet I bought used a few years ago. It's all going away. Well, I'll be keeping the table, chairs and desk, just not in this room.

This is the view from standing next to the desk. The wall that has the picture on it will be coming down...half of it anyway. It will become a breakfast bar. The window is staying as is. We decided to get rid of the dining room because, in the 7+ years we've been here, we've used it only a handful of times. More often than not, this table is covered with a bunch of stuff, whether it be Rachel's school projects, craft projects, or just random crap that lands there and doesn't get put away. I have a backup plan if and when I ever do have a big holiday dinner.

This is a view of the kitchen from the bay window, near our kitchen table. The mess to the right of the refrigerator is a bakers rack that holds all my cookbooks, my mixer, clean dish towels, a wine rack (filled mainly with cooking wines), Fred's coffee and other incidentals. It, too, will be going away and in its place will be cabinets and the microwave.

We are planning to do this project entirely on our own, with the exception of some minor plumbing work which I will outline in a later post. So yes, it's going to take quite a while to complete.

Some of the things I'm stuck on are what to do with the floor in the dining room. Right now it is carpet. I'm thinking of putting down slate tiles. But will that be too many different kinds of flooring? Getting hard wood to match what's in the kitchen will be next to impossible, and replacing all the hard wood will be way out of our budget.

And what should I do with the walls? We're going to do a tile backsplash above the stove and countertops, but what about the walls that will still be exposed in the dining room and the remaining walls in the kitchen? The walls of the "formal" living room (more like a sitting room) that is off the dining room are red, very red. The walls of the family room, which is where I took the first picture from, are a textured blue. Not too dark and not too light. It's almost like a light denim blue, I guess. And the walls of the hallway from the front door into the kitchen are white with thick stripes. The prior owners painted them. They alternated flat and satin or glossy white to make subtle stripes, which I like. Unlike the circus tent strips above the counters that I hate.

Of course, I'll take pictures along the way and I'll try to get them posted more frequently!