In light of sharing our completed kitchen, I thought I would share a few “before” and “during” shots of the process. Now, in a sense these are not true “before” shots… because when we moved in the cabinets were a light shade of pink/purple with purple walls to match, and an old tile backsplash with orange and brown fruit bowls or roosters or something… I’m sure we have some photos of that kicking around somewhere, so I will share when and if I find them… it was bad!
In an attempt to fix that, we went in the opposing direction.We had 3 men living upstairs… so I painted the backsplash white, and painted the cabinets like so:
We added a dishwasher, and lost some precious cabinet space… but it was worth it. however, we were left with a lot of unusable/awkward to get at space… let me show you where:
That is mirrored on the other side… the one door allowed for decent access, but made it really great for our bebes to do stuff like this…
So after much thought, some planning, and a few visits to the ikea web site, we decided it was time to redo our kitchen. Nothing crazy, but the doors falling off and squeeky, sketchy drawers just weren’t quite cutting it. Not to mention we needed to find a way to get more storage and counterspace in what is a 10X8ft kitchen! The eating area I could live with… but the kitchen was brining the rest of the house down.
It was a great feeling pulling those wall cabinets down… but not without some hitches. They were SO stuck to the walls, and, whoever installed them used some OLD screws that were partially stripped, or else they stripped those suckers during install… a pain to remove to say the least.
I always have 2 feelings when demo begins 1) wow it seems so big and open! and 2) what have we gotten ourselves into.
We protected the floor using cardboard, because there really is no “clean” way to go about removing a tile backsplash. We did it while the base cabinets were still in, so there was less chance of it falling on the floor. We used a hammer, scraper and crow bar (more to smash than to pry) and did our best to keep the wall in tact. We planned to cover it with beadboard. If we were tiling, we would have replaced the drywall. Thank you beadboard paneling.
We had a few plumbing things to deal with… and some scrubbing, but thankfully there weren’t any major water issues.
This was somewhere around the day 4 mark. 2 days demo/clean… take junk away. Then came building the cabinets and THEN came the install.
We kept our original appliances… because they work, and would not be difficult to change out in the future, but we did decide to go with a microwave hood fan. While this is not ideal (as I liked having things open above the oven) originally we had no microwave (yes its true) but figured it might be a good thing to incorporate. We wanted to keep our counter-space, so we went with an above the range option from IKEA. I think it was a good choice. I know our appliances aren’t all matchy matchy… but, it doesn’t bother me! I love our oven, and am used to how it bakes etc… 😉 You may notice how excited I was about the little cabinet with the glass doors… so excited that I put dishes in there before we even had countertops… nerd. alert. You will also notice that the end cabinet originally stopped where the disgusting wall line is near the light switch. We carried both the upper cabinets and base cabinets about 8 inches further, giving us more storage, and more counter space to the right of the oven! yahoo!
We bought our countertops after the fact because we had originally wanted to go with the lagan (the cheaper butcher block style from IKEA) but, they only had 4 ft lengths and didn’t seem to have plans to restock. This didn’t work for us, so we went with the thicker Oak (aka more expensive) We could have gone with laminate. However… I have always loved the look of white cabinets and butcher block countertops. It love wood… it makes me feel happy! Things are fresh but cozy… which is kind of our style. When this first cut went in, I was giddy as a school girl! We did all of the work on our kitchen (for the most part) when our kids were in bed. Sometimes we stayed up til 3 am, but, we had things functional within a week.
This is where I’ll leave things for today! Next up we will talk countertop install, hardware… and sinks! 🙂