Kitchen Renovation
Our kitchen is probably one of the most used rooms in our house. We don’t just use our kitchen for cooking. We spend time doing crafts, playing, dancing, planning, blogging, etc. I mean I could go on and on. As I am writing this post, I am sitting at our kitchen counter with my coffee, water, and computer. We LOVED our kitchen remodel at our old house. One of my biggest desire when searching for a new home back in 2019 was finding one with the perfect kitchen. Unfortunately you can’t get everything you want. But I was sure to find a kitchen that had potential. And ours did. The cabinets are beautiful (at least to us). Sure they are not the off-white cabinets we had before, but this have so much custom detailing and are a great color nonetheless. The layout was ideal too. I even had my double ovens I always wanted. But like I said, it wasn’t perfect. I didn’t have a backsplash, and we once again had a very hightop bar. I also hated the faucet. So we knew when buying this house we would eventually re-do parts of the kitchen. We finally finished this renovation about 2 weeks ago, so I wanted to share with you all about it!
So first let me start out with some before pictures. I don’t have any really great ones because I just didn’t think about taking them myself. Instead, I have a few from through the last year and a half that I found. As you can see, the kitchen is fine and livable. But it was just missing elements we wanted and loved about our old kitchen. Our bar heigh was way too tall, and there was a lot of unused space. The sink and faucet were not my favorites. And the missing backsplash was depressing. I also hated our fluorescent under cabinet lighting. Two of the lights had completely went out by the time we made it to our renovation. One of them was even partially burnt.
Thankfully we had far less decisions to make that with our last kitchen renovation. The big decision was really the backsplash. We knew we wanted to keep the granite the same. They were actually able to match our old granite so we only had to replace the granite on the sink side and not the stove side. We went to our favorite local store, Madison Paint and Flooring, and we found help there. We were given a few samples to take home, but it came down to the two below. In the end we went with the more brown one in order to better match the cabinets. We also opted for a darker grout instead of the lighter one found on Pinterest. Of course we did have to pick a sink and faucet, but we got the exact sink we had at our other house, and the faucet is the same except bronze and a pull down version.
The actual kitchen work was supposed to take a week. We called them earlier December to book after we reviewed their estimate. They actually had a spot open the next week, but we decided to at least wait until after Christmas. So they came January 4. So the work ended up taking almost 8 weeks. Now it wasn’t constant work. But it took almost 8 weeks from when they came January 4, to when the wrapped up recently. The work itself was probably about 2 weeks worth of work in the end, but there was a lot of shipping delays that caused the work to take much longer. Luckily we were in no rush, so the delay was not the end of the world for us.
On January 4th, they came and removed the bar top, the panels below the bar, and took measurements for the granite. Thankfully they left the kitchen livable by only removing the bar section was you can see below.
Around 2 weeks later they came to install the granite, sink, and faucet. The sink caused the major delay here. It came in, but was broken. So they had to reorder it. They granite guys did an amazing job matching the granite that already existed.
Now we started debating what to do about our kitchen table. One thing I loved about this kitchen was it allowing us to have a space for our table. But I also knew we would be primarily eating at the bar (and we have). So the debate was if it made the area too cluttered by keeping the table in the kitchen. Brad did some modeling for me.
About another 2 weeks later, they came to do the backsplash. The backsplash itself turned out really good. It took them about 3 days to do it, but again there were some issues, so they did not work 3 full days.
Once they finished the backsplash, it made us hate our under cabinet lights even more. So we decided to replace them ASAP. Since the wiring already existed, we decided to change them ourselves. We went with the puck lights like we had at our previous house. I must say, it was probably the smoothest project we have ever done ourselves, ha!
Around another 2 weeks later, the guys came out to install the paneling below our bar. Apparently there was some issues with our cabinets, and it caused the paneling to not be levels, and the color was not exactly perfect. They came back out to remove it and fix it.
This took another week/week and a half due to the ice storm, but they came back out, fixed the paneling, and primarily fixed the color. The color is just odd because it matches parts of our cabinets, but not all. It is just a hard color I think it match up exactly.
And now our kitchen is complete! In the end, we added a backsplash to both sides of our kitchen, added puck under cabinet lighting, replaced the granite on the sink side in order to lower the bar top, replaced our sink and faucet, replaced our panels under our bar, and we ended up moving the kitchen table to the dining room and adding a coffee bar area in its place. We hope to get a small couch to add where the two chairs are by the window. We also plan to replace the coffee bar with a nicer one over time. And we also plan to replace all of our appliances. Our goal is to replace the fridge, dishwasher, and microwave in the next few weeks. We will replace the ovens and stovetop next year.
