Home Rennovations: The Kitchen

Just when you thought the home rennovations posts were over!  Truth be told, we paused on the house stuff for a while because we thought we might just pack up and move.  It hasn't worked out, so we decided to finish what we started and the holiday break seemed like the perfect time to do just that.  So, we spent Christmas Eve putting new flooring in the kitchen and dining room and now both are complete.  I don't have any before photos of my dining room, so we'll do just the afters in a separate post and today we'll look at all the work we've done on the kitchen.  The first time I stepped into this kitchen two things came to mind:  There's so much storage, and Thanks to the skylight, there's so much light!

Neither one of these things ended up being terribly accurate.  Storage is pretty tight when you get enough food in these cabinets to feed four people, not to mention that design was such a poor use of the space that most of it was wasted.  As far as the lighting goes all of the colors are so dark that apart from noonish when the sun is shining directly in, this kitchen is very gloomy.  With these colors, it kind of reminded me of living in a hollowed out log.  

I have always loved yellow kitchens and so I painted over the original dark walls with this bright buttery yellow, but due to the blue color of the countertops and the green of the tile, this yellow ended up looking more like stomach bile than butter.  It has made me feel vaguely sick every time I entered this room, but I wanted to give it a fair chance (and I also really didn't want to repaint), so we've kept it this way for years.

I never got used to it, so since the paint is the thing I hated the most, it's the place I started.  Mr. Bleu balked, the memory of painting it was still too fresh, so I promised I would paint it without his help, which I did by working in the afternoons and evenings after work for a few hours at a time over the course of about three weeks.  It was totally worth it because I finally got rid of that horrible limey yellow color!

After that I tore down all that awful green tile and replaced it with white.  The dark blue counter tops were next to go, also replaced with white and with a butcher block sink top that Mr. Bleu made from trees he cut down on our property.  Then the broken microwave came down at long last!  I've hated it for years beause: 1. we don't use a microwave anyway, and 2.  it takes up so much space in such a small kitchen.  We put a new metal tile backsplash behind the stove and a new hood and it looks so much better.

Then Mr. Bleu took out the corner counter top, built one by hand that made it flush with the wall, and put in a wrap around shelving unit and a larger sink (which we got for a song at the local Restore).  We also took the sagging flooring out from under the sink and some of the bottom cabinets.  We put new vinyl flooring down to protect the floor and now have two fully functional spaces since everything doesn't roll toward the sagging center anymore.  Before they were unusable spaces now we have so much extra storage!

All the cabinets were taken down, sanded, painted, wood filigree added for florish, and handles painted as well as shelf paper added and then everything was reinstalled looking so much cleaner and brighter.  Huzzah!

Wow, I am so glad that I took before photos because the result is dramatically different.  I'm glad to have the comparison, because we did a ton of work.  The very last thing of all was putting down new laminate flooring.  Laminate flooring is shockingly expensive, so we shopped around for a couple of months and waited until we found a bargain.  It took two days to install in the kitchen and dining room and was actually a very enjoyable process like working together on a giant puzzel.  I wasn't really on board with the gray wood color at first, but now I think it was the right choice both financially and stylistically.

As far as storage goes, you'll notice in the Before photos that every available space was covered.  I very deliberately did not clean my kitchen in those pics because I wanted to convey just how cluttered and chaotic this space was.  In addition to all this storage space created by the remodel, I also went through all my cabinets of kitchen gadgets and food and got rid of any food that was old or expired (the pigs really loved me for that!) and donated all my unused and unnecessary kitchen tools.    For everything else, I found or created a designated place for it that was not just sitting on a counter top.  The trick will be keeping it that way as my family seems determined not to put things away, but I have made my resolve to live in a tidy home moving forward and I intend to do my very best to stick with it.

This kitchen feels like home now, it feels like me, it feels like us.  I won't say I loved all the hard work that we did to make it happen, but man oh man was it ever worth the effort!