Our Kitchen Transformation

The first room that we  tackled was the kitchen!


Now, most people will move in the summer. So if there are renovations being done, the first things are the backyards or patios- basically anything that is outdoors. 

To me, the kitchen is most important room of the house. It's where I take care of my family and I could not do that in the state it was left in when we took possession. The pictures you are about to see were taken after a week of non-stop cleaning. A HUGE thank you to my wonderful mother in law who came over everyday to help me scrub!

This is what our kitchen used to look like:

Feast your eyes on the lovely, green, laminate counter tops with an oak trim that my mother in law said was in style when they bought their first house in 1983!

Take a look at those appliances! Now, it's one thing to have old appliances. It's another to have old appliances that DO NOT WORK! 

The inspectors told us that 3 out of 4 elements would not turn on and the exhausts (not just the built in extractor that came with the cook top but the exhaust on the ceiling) did not work and seemed as though they have not been working for years...excellent! I am going to assume the exhaust on the ceiling was a super vacuum exhaust, when it did work, since it is a whopping 14 feet away from the elements!

The seal around the door of the oven was completely melted and when it was turned on, you could feel heat radiating off of it from 2 feet away...which is maybe why they had the fridge right beside it....(who puts a fridge right beside an oven in a kitchen layout anyway?)

 

The floors in this picture may look alright...but let me assure you that no amount of heavy duty cleaner and scrubbing could make me walk on those tiles without shoes on! Of course, the matching backsplash had to have the same filthy grout to complete the whole hell's kitchen kinda look the previous home owners were going for- at least that's what we think they were trying to do by not cleaning for the past 5 years.  

Note the unnecessary, old school fluorescent light fixture... why did they even need that? As if the two other hanging light fixtures, under cabinet/ under mount lighting, and the huge triple sliding doors did not give off enough light..

This was the view from the kitchen. Closed off from the rest of the house. Maybe it was because they were trying to hide it?


So if we hated it so much...why did we buy it? 
What we saw in this kitchen:
1) A layout we could re-work to make it functional for us
2) Solid oak cabinets- you know what they say "they don't make em like they used to"
3) Lots of natural light
4) Potential for an open concept space that could have a view of the living room



This is what our kitchen looks like now:

Bye bye green and oak trimmed counter tops! So long dark cabinets! Hello shiny new appliances that work! And look- a stove with an exhaust that actually extracts smells and smoke!! Brilliant!

We moved some of the appliances around and added new cabinetry where it was needed to accommodate a layout we thought made more sense.

We switched out the flooring and backdrop. Stay tuned for another post on why we decided not to go with tile for either.
Since this picture has been taken, we have installed new outlet coverings and found our "perfect bar stools"!

Just a random picture of two hot ladies... jk =P meet my beautiful friends- Christina and Shanna. They're sitting on our perfect bar stools and no they are not the $400 per chair french bar stools from restoration hardware! Tricky tricky!
This is a view from the kitchen into the dining room. We removed the wall so that we could have clear sight lines into the living room.


$$$ How much cheddar did we spend?!?!? $$$
Because we were willing to get a little (more like a lot) hands on, Derek and I managed to save a lot of money! The entire kitchen reno cost us less than $7000. 
That includes all the materials (yes, even the marble), our new appliances, installation services, reconfiguring the whole kitchen layout, and cost of calling in all professionals to hook this that and the other up- and everything else that went into this kitchen!

Looking back on the photos of what it looked like when we first stepped into the house, it's not hard to see why everyone had said we were dreaming that $7000 would get us anywhere, let alone our dream kitchen!
But with a little imagination and creativity, we did it!
Later on this week, I will be doing a step by step blog post to show you what we did to achieve our dream kitchen on our tight budget =)



But now, here are the before and afters side by side if you wanna check them out!