This is my first home construction project and, though I am pretty confident in my ability to decorate a home, I have zero practice in real design. Getting to the point of action has been an arduous process. It began with a very quick and rude wake up call that a total kitchen renovation - labor, new cabinets, new floors, etc - cannot cost less than $13,000 (yes, I really thought we could have a pretty fabulous kitchen for that amount of money with someone else doing the work) and has morphed into an educational challenge of blending budget with a stylish kitchen that is perfectly practical and functional.
It is possible, with sensibility, careful planning, and access to hundreds of decorating magazines (thanks mom) to design a kitchen on a meager budget (yet, again, I define meager in kitchen standards...to us there is nothing meager about the cost of this kitchen, but nothing good ever comes without a little sacrifice...). For example, the first floor of our house is made up of a kitchen and one large living room. Rather than knocking down the wall to make the first floor open, we opted instead to cut-out a large piece of the kitchen wall to open the room and then use the rest of the wall to build a bench with storage space. This small detail killed two birds with one stone (apologizes for the cliche) by giving us the storage essential in a small house AND an official "eat-in-kitchen."
Background
And how is it that we decided to embark on this kitchen renovation journey in the first place? We bought our first home two years ago under-value for the neighborhood knowing that we would have to invest in some elbow grease over the years to build enough equity in the house that we can sell in about 8-10 years and buy the next house. After upgrading the electrical paneling, landscaping, painting, and installing new windows, we decided the next big step should be the kitchen. Our house is from the 1950s and, though built like a rock and maintained perfectly, the previous owner was not a big fan of bringing the interior into the 21st century: Cheap plastic counters (double emphasis on "cheap" and "plastic") grace the room; Ugly laminate flooring gleams below our feet; White cabinets have been painted over so many times the doors will not close. Kitchens reap among the best returns on investment and we spend a lot of time in the kitchen. It was a no-brainer where we would start renovating. What is the saying...build a kitchen not a house?
Intentions
Next week, our contractors will do inventory on the cabinets and appliances in the house to make sure everything is on-site before the kitchen is gutted. From there, we will plan the demo. Along the way, I will take pictures and recount the colorful happenings that we are bound to encounter in the process. For your viewing pleasure, below are some "before" pictures of our kitchen as well as some current pictures of the status of our house following the big delivery yesterday. Don't let some of the photos fool you...the kitchen looks way worse in person than on film. Bon appetite!
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| Our basement of boxes - mainly cabinets |
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| Current view of our living room - cozy, right? |
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| Our poor delivery guys spent 30 minutes hauling these boxes into our basement in 100 degree heat. I cannot imagine how many boxes there would be if we had a big kitchen. |
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| View from our living room (the kitchen is on the other side). This is the wall where the cut-out will be |
