If you’ve followed along on Instagram stories you’ll know that we’ve had a lot of progress on our kitchen since the beginning of December… and have been living out of our dining room and living room as the kitchen as been worked on. It’s been both easier and more difficult than I thought but I hope to share more of that in another post. We are now mostly operating back in the kitchen but still without a sink. The morning after the pantry was installed I got to work filling it… I was done having the food on the dining room table!
Let me jog your memory on what the room looked like before. The sliding doors, ceiling beams and cabinets were all an orangey stain and the wall to wall carpet under where we ate wasn’t a match for my kids and my (lack thereof) stain removal skills. We were ready for all of it to come out!
The first thing we did was remove the desk you see (above) to the right of our kitchen table. AJ blew out the wall (the non-load bearing part) so that we could have our contractor come in and frame in the spot for the new pantry cabinet.
The photo below was taken from almost the exact same spot, we configured the island to sit at the edge of the platform and have two entrances / exits on each side rather than one bottleneck pathway. Then we widened the doorway from the mudroom into the kitchen. Our goal was to create a kitchen that was both ascetically pleasing but also had great flow and was party ready.
Adding hardwood floors to the space was a no brainer since the rest of the downstairs has them… but we thought we knew we wanted the color to match the rest of the downstairs until we saw the raw wood and it was so beautiful! Were are still not sure what we think of the color (other than it’s light and bright) but we decided to go with a pickled oak stain by Minwax and then followed it up with two coats of polyurethane. If we had just done an oil based poly we would have come out with amber colored floors (like our upstairs) which was not what we were looking for. We figure we can always go to the darker color six months down the road if we still are not settled on the color.
Keep in mind that everything you see in these photos are a 1/3 done!! We are planning on having wall the walls painted, new light fixtures, counters, appliances and trim work done… but just having it be decent shape after three weeks feels pretty great.
When planning out the kitchen I tried to make sure to think about those little details that make a space feel custom so I ordered doors for the sides of the prep island to give it that furniture look.
The photo below shows our prep island. We chose different colored cabinets in Gray Screen by Sherwin-Williams and it’s an incredible color. Sometimes it’s straight gray, other times it reads as the most gorgeous blue / gray. We plan on painting our walls that color about at 1/4 to 1/2 strength so the room is still very light but so that’s there’s contrast with the trim still.
In the photo below you can get an idea of what a panel ready dishwasher looks like before and after the panel (see either side of the apron front sink base):
Our counters are being templated on January 4 which means we need every cabinet installed by then. This weekend AJ and my father-in-law took out the old microwave and oven cabinet and moved it over (so that now it’s blocking the office door) so that we could still have those appliances while we wait for the range to arrive sometime in mid-January.
We changed our minds very last minute and refused the stainless fridge we ordered because we decided we wanted to get a 48 inch fridge (which will go where you see the wires from our modem). It was one of the only things in the kitchen AJ put his foot down about and I think it was a good decision. We just need to order the fridge and then order the panels for the front of it. Right now we are using our old black one which we haven’t moved back into the kitchen yet.
Lastly, this is what happens when you try to do a kitchen reno with twins… 
I’m so excited to share with you more progress. We are especially ready to see trim go up around certain areas (like the pantry) because that’ll make that area feel done. And anyone local, we’d love to hear recommendations for affordable painters who do a great job, we are going to hire this job out because of the height of the ceiling and all the trim work (we want to paint the sliders).
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