KITCHEN PROJECT

I've been planning for some time to share photos of our kitchen renovation that was finally completed this winter. We didn't have the funds to do a complete remodel so kept it modest by maintaining the same footprint, while opening it up to the dining room. The dining room was the original living/dining room of our 1956 ranch-style home. Sometime during the 60s the house was expanded by adding a large living room and new garage, leaving the old living room functioning as a family room. The kitchen was never expanded and when we moved in to the house with our teenage son in 1986 the kitchen was tiny, dark, and highly inefficient. The kitchen had been updated sometime in the 70s, as indicated by the harvest gold appliances. The washer and dryer location was also in the kitchen and cut back even more on usable space. The 70s changes were so poorly done that in order to open and load the dishwasher we had to first open the oven door for clearance. This kitchen needed SO MUCH WORK! Over the years it has been a work in progress, adding improvements as we could afford them. Last year before the beginning of the renovation the room looked like this:

This was actually a major improvement from when we first moved it. Over the years we removed an overhead cabinet that hung over the breakfast bar, replaced a solid wood door to the patio area with a French door, replaced the old vinyl floor, enlarged the window over the sink, put in a skylight, and had pantry cabinets built along one whole side of the kitchen. The plastic laminate countertops were chipped and split at the seams so we started by planning to replace the countertops with quartz. So, if we replace the countertops shouldn't we also replace the sink and cooktop, and how much would it cost to remove the old breakfast bar and have all of the doors and drawers replaced, and what about widening the opening to the dining room? That's how it all started. 

To shorten this whole story, here we are now:

New quartz countertops, cooktop, sink, tile backsplash, vent hood, overhead cabinets, and wider opening into the dining room. We didn't want to go to the expense of all new cabinets so the cabinet shop installed new face frames, doors, and drawers in the lower existing cabinets and built two new overhead cabinets. We chose to have these painted instead of stained, but brought the wood over to the bar top and open shelves on the dining room side to pull it all together.

So, it's not my dream kitchen but it is so much more efficient - and we finally have enough storage for everything. While the kitchen is still minute, it now feels very open.