The Kitchen: Before

The kitchen is the only room in the house you haven't seen yet. The reason for this is because every time I walk into the kitchen, I cringe. No one else (except my uber stylish friend, Claudia) has had this reaction, but I just can't help myself. White cabinets (installed incorrectly). Creamy walls. Gray backsplash. Cream grout. Weird, faux-tuscan backsplash border. White(ish) trim. White appliances/black stove. Gray swirly laminate with a wood border. Brown tile. I JUST. CAN'T. TAKE. IT. 

The dining room is through the door that Drew is standing in. I am taking the photo standing next to the sink.

Window looking out onto the driveway (picturesque!)
The sink area is to the left.
That door leads to the backyard.

The other thing that drives me nuts about this kitchen is the wall cabinets. You can't really see it in the photo above, but the cabinets above the stove go all the way to the eight-foot ceiling. Those of you who know me (and I think that's everyone reading, right?) know that I'm really short. What on earth do I need with cabinets that go all the way to the ceiling? Even Drew, who is much taller, can't reach anything up there. It also feels like the cabinets are going to eat you. So there's that. 

And then there are the wall cabinets above the sink. (Measurements approximate)

1. An 8" set of open shelves 

2. An 8" closed cabinet

3. A 24" glass-front cabinet

4. 30" of open plate storage with large open shelves above

I don't mind the open plate storage or the glass cabinet, but the two small cabinets are totally useless. Not to mention that the 18" drawer stack next to the dishwasher isn't even wide enough to hold a silverware tray. The cabinet under the sink is so full of pipes/garbage disposal that we can't even fit our trash can underneath. 

There's also a pantry with a giant fridge in it. The fridge sticks out several inches beyond the door frame and can't open all the way because it hits the shelves on the opposite wall. We keep all our "pantry" food in here, but there's not a ton of it. Cue more open shelves and a lot of random stuff that doesn't belong in a pantry (Hellooo dustbuster! Potting soil! Kitty litter we used to soak up some hazmat during the bathroom project! Antique teakettles!). Also, every single person that has walked into the kitchen says "That's so weird that the fridge is over there." Yep. I think so too.

Now I know many of you look at the photos above and think, "What's wrong with this girl? It's fine." And you might be right. This kitchen is clearly in keeping with someone's design aesthetic, but it's not mine. For someone who loves to cook (and eat), a cringeworthy kitchen is depressing. On the more practical side, the laminate countertops, strange layout, peeling and improperly hung thermafoil cabinets with bowing shelves, and dated appliances are not going to make selling the place easy (once we're to that point). We believe that the guy who sold the previous owners the house did a rush job on the kitchen and the bathroom to sell it, and then the previous owners did nothing to change the aesthetics of the house for their 7 years here. 


So we're renovating the kitchen. We are not doing this "for resale value," because in this market, that's a risky reason to do things to your house. But it can't freaking hurt, right? Mostly, we're doing this so I don't whine about the kitchen all the time. As Drew knows, stopping the whining is a valid reason to do pretty much anything. If we can enjoy a lovely kitchen for most of our time here and then not make potential buyers gag when they walk in, we will have made the right choice. 

The backsplash and the countertops are the things I hate most, so at first we were just going to replace those. Then we started noticing the peeling thermafoil and the utter uselessness of many of the cabinets. I also felt strange installing a lovely (heavy) countertops on top of less-than-functional cabinets. What's the point of that? So we started looking at cabinets too (more on that later) but were planning on keeping the layout the same. 

But then, we went up to the third floor and saw our neighbor's kitchen.  Someone, at some point, had walled off the door between the kitchen and the pantry and made the pantry into a walk-in closet (the master bedroom closet is to the right of the fridge in the above photo - you can see the jog in the wall). The refrigerator was actually *in* the kitchen. 

Talk about killing two birds with one stone - the lack of closet space was the one thing we really, really didn't like about this house and moving the fridge into the kitchen makes it less stretched out and weirdly shaped and you can actually, you know, COOK STUFF in the room without running all over the place with drippy raw chicken trays. (That happened the other day and poor Drew got yelled at. I have an irrational fear of raw chicken juice and won't touch it myself). 

But back to the renovation plans. 

We've decided (for now) to make the pantry into a walk-in closet and to replace cabinets, countertops, and backsplash during "phase one" of the renovation. We may change our minds if costs explode, but that's the plan for now. "Phase two" will be when we get ready to sell the house (whenever that is) and will involve new appliances. We've decided that there's no reason to replace the old ones now when they work perfectly fine and when they'll be "old" already by the time we're trying to sell. Everything is a "normal" size (30" oven, 24" dishwasher, etc.) so exchanging old for new shouldn't be a problem down the line. The probable exception to this, however, is the fridge. We may need to replace that with a counter-depth fridge so it doesn't take over the entire kitchen. 

The photos above are obviously from before we moved in. I'll post photos of the "bandaid" work I've already done to the kitchen next to make it vaguely more palatable in the interim. 

For now though, I hope your'e ready for a whole lotta kitchen talk. I know I am.