Kitchen Inspiration

Flashback: Winter/Spring of 2010 the hubs and I were  looking at houses and after far too many houses to count we realized that to get what we really wanted, within our budget, we had to buy an older house that needed work. We were going to have to get our hands dirty or pay someone else to get their hands dirty in order to get the house we truly wanted.  The kitchen was near the top of the importance list for both of us because we both love to cook. I'm more of a baker and vegetable person and the hubs takes his meat incredibly serious, but between the two of us we can put together a pretty decent meal.

Our current kitchen is scary. Remember those Euro-style laminate cabinets and countertops from the 1980s - they're still in our kitchen. We've also got terrible vinyl floors and wallpaper that makes my eyes want to peel.  To top things off we've got the U-shape that doesn't even work in our kitchen and low ceilings. 

In a nut shell our kitchen is so bad that we felt completely justified in taking a wrecking ball to it! Seriously, we're taking a wall out and completely changing the layout of the kitchen.  I can't wait.

When we first moved into our house we decided to live with the kitchen for at least two years to get used to the layout, figure out what we hated, and come up with a plan for a full renovation. Bids went out to three design firms and I'm happy to say our deposit has cleared with one of them. Construction is scheduled to start in mid-January. Neither one of us wanted to deal with the holiday rush and risk having this renovation take any longer than it had to. 

That paradoxically seems so far away, but it also seems so close! Our cabinets have been ordered. The hubs refused to even contemplate white cabinets which meant we went in the total opposite direction and have selected a shaker style cabinet in a espresso brown color. We're buying our appliances this week during Black Friday sales. We'll be purchasing our solid hickory floors (so excited about these!) either this week or next week.  We've finalized our pendant light selection and just need to "add them to our cart" already. Same thing for the garbage disposal and new window. A lot of the major decisions have been made and things will start to feel "real" once supplies start to show up at our house.

Yet, we're still finalizing other things: granite, paint color, hardware, backsplash, faucet, and I'm sure we're missing something! We're going to the granite yard in December so that means we'll finalize that sooner rather than later. 

We're doing most of the demolition, besides physically taking down a wall, in addition we'll be doing the painting, floors, and backsplash.  I think we're actually going to wait to do the backsplash a few months later just so we can take one decision off of our plate right now and finalize that color/texture/material down the road. Plus, I really want to try my hand at some tile work (yes, the hubs thinks I'm crazy). 

Neither one of us is looking forward to eating massive amounts of take out while our kitchen is being renovated, but I know every fast food meal I choke down will be one less I'll have to eat! I hope once our kitchen is done I'll never want to leave it and I'll be cooking up a storm! 

If you have any kitchen renovation tips - please leave them in the comments! I'm sad that we won't have our new kitchen for this year's Thanksgiving dinner, but at the same time I'm so thankful that it's coming in due time.