Archive for April, 2011
kitchen beast: defeated!
Hooray! The kitchen is finally finished! No more dinners at Taco Bell! No more washing dishes in the bathtub!
All things considered it really wasn’t that bad and the wait wasn’t too long. We had a lot of help and we’re so thankful for everyone that contributed to our new kitchen.
We have a ton of photos to share of the new kitchen, but before we do, let’s take a walk down memory lane and take a look at what our original kitchen looked like…
So this is what you used to see as soon as you walked into the house. On the left is the staircase heading downstairs, and on the right is a giant wall of black walnut. There was no light in the entryway, so at night it felt like you were walking into a cave.
This is the view of the front door from the living room. The kitchen is through that tiny opening on the left.
And here are some shots from inside the kitchen. It was a small and contained box and there wasn’t enough room for two people to be in there and not get in each other’s way. Our friend Rick described the typical kitchen models in our neighborhood as the original housewife’s cubical, and at one point I’m sure that’s how it was intended.
These are our awesome, modern appliances, sticking out like a sore thumb in our woefully outdated kitchen.
This shot is back a bit more to include our dining room area.
Here is our dining room space. We’ve had this set of table and chairs almost as long as we’ve been together. They’re pretty modern and kind of work with the old and new kitchen, but they’re getting a bit rickety and will be replaced at some point.
And that was the old kitchen! It was fine for a while, but it just didn’t have the space and function that we needed. We wanted something that was more modern, practical, and open…
And here is the new kitchen! This is the first thing you see when you walk in the door. The space is now open with plenty of room to move around. The cabinets are a light maple. We wanted a light cabinet to open up the space since we have dark pine ceilings. We decided to go with quartz countertops (Silestone) because it matched the style of the house better than granite options we looked at.
The island is one of our favorite features in the new kitchen. It’s enormous! They could have filmed a season of Lost on this thing! After seeing the drawers installed we changed our mind on what hardware we wanted to use in the kitchen. We wanted hardware that was as minimal as possible and didn’t take away from the sexiness the island had without hardware.
And finally, our dining room window is Friday’s favorite spot in the house. She likes to watch everything that’s going on outside and bark and neighbors and such. We decided to get her a new bed from molly mutt bed that matched the style of our house and our new kitchen. She seems to dig it.
And there you have it. It took a few months to complete, but it was well worth the headaches. You might have noticed that there is a space between the two cabinets on the back wall by the dinner table. Eventually that wall will have shelves between the cabinets so we can display our fancy, schmancy vintage plates and such. Hopefully that is coming soon. We’ve also got a few finishing touches to do (baseboards, paint, etc.) and we’re still contemplating whether or not to do a tile backspash of some sort.
Overall we are thrilled with the result. We both still walk in there and can’t believe it’s our kitchen. We’re already starting to forget what the old one looked like!
