Kitchen Exposed

Maybe I should get to the kitchen post. I realize I'm doing this blog slightly backwards, where I'm writing about projects Patrick and I have long since concluded (or at least have only one or two minor details to finish). In the case of the kitchen, for example, we (read "he") still hasn't put the air conditioning vent cover back in the ceiling due to a loss of the appropriate screws. Where do they go? They're like chapstick, always disappearing when you need them. 

Our kitchen looked like much of the rest of the house - dark, brown, and too small. We had an avocado-mustard-y colored wall oven (that actually still worked) and cream colored appliances (including another oven with a cooktop). I guess the two ovens would have come in handy had we done Thanksgiving at our house before the remodel. However, you couldn't walk past someone that was between the fridge and the breakfast bar, and you couldn't even sit at the breakfast bar because your knees would hit the bar, so that wouldn't have been too helpful on Thanksgiving. The ceiling was low and caused a mild case of claustrophobia. 

Pictures from our first walkthrough - the renters hadn't completely moved out yet. 

We moved in, and with the help of Patrick's mom and sister, cleaned the nastiness out of the kitchen. The cabinets were gross and covered in grime. 

Pictures after I got a hold of it.

So, one day, after I learned my nephew, his wife and two sons (I'm 26 and have a 22 year old nephew because my mom is a champ like that) were coming to visit, I convinced Patrick to help me paint the kitchen cabinets. A few days later, it looked like this: 

View from front door (where the refrigerator and avocado oven wall was before).

It was great. Somehow I had managed to trick Patrick into destroying the kitchen. Although, he was the one who started ripping out the breakfast bar with a vengeance. It was easy going until we got to the point where we had to start rebuilding. Once we learned from my brother there was nothing he could do to salvage the cabinets to re-use the upper cabinets to work with the new configuration we'd created, we kind of panicked. It wasn't like we'd planned on gutting our entire kitchen and spending thousands of dollars on new everything. Luckily, we saved ourselves tons of money by demo-ing the whole thing ourselves, and my brother being such a resourceful guy, hooked us up with a cabinet builder who gave us quite a good deal on building completely new cabinets. (Meanwhile, not only one set of guests, but two sets of guests came and went and our kitchen was torn apart - oops.)

I definitely wouldn't recommend going about this without a plan. We didn't have a kitchen sink for too long, and trust me, it's not fun to eat dinners out of a microwave on the floor and wash dishes out of a sink. In reality it was probably about a month, which isn't awful, but it's so much nicer to have a kitchen!

When we started to rebuild, I knew I wanted white cabinets, so that was an easy choice. The countertops were the difficult part to choose since I wanted a white-ish granite, yet the only pattern of granite that fit into our budget was the one that ended up on our counters, so maybe it wasn't such a difficult choice after all. More like process of elimination. Turns out I love the countertops anyways, so it all worked out. I did cause a little trouble and request seeded glass instead of the regular cabinet doors for the two center most doors, seen immediately when facing the kitchen. The color of the kitchen is the same color we painted the living room, called "aqua breeze" by Behr.

And some pictures of our wonderful, white, clean, finished kitchen! What do you think?