I love what my kitchen can become

I somehow forgot that renovations are hard, stressful, time consuming, and expensive.  We had huge success with removing the badly built in giant microwave and cabinet that we decided to do a huge remodel to the kitchen.  We are house poor so it had to be within he budget, which meant no ikea kitchen cabinets (yes they would have only cost about $4000, which is nothing when you think of a full remodel, but that was not even close to what we could manage).  So we decided to reuse the ones we had, paint them, reconfigure, and purchase a couple new ones to match (as closely as possible).  

How about some crappy iPhone pictures to start the story.

See what happened there?  We beautifully removed the microwave cabinet, painted the wall.  It took a couple hours at most, we even had a play date in the middle of completing it.  Basically this didn't disrupt our lives at all and we got cocky! Oh- we can TOTALLY redo the whole kitchen because they went smoothly…..HA!

So then we went on.  There are not many pictures of the demo.  It was more complicated, messier, and longer then we anticipated.  But all the cabinets were moved, all the backsplash and counters, sick, etc. The floor remained, but will be replaced eventually (boy the floor looks hideous now!).

Well look at that, not too bad right?  Far from complete, but we were happy to have some sort of working kitchen again.  As you can see all the cabinets on the left were from the original kitchen, reused and reconfigured.  The ones on the right were purchased from lows, unfinished.  They are not a perfect match, but due to time and money constraints we went with it and hoped the painting would make it work- I feel like it did.  That cardboard on the floor?  The cabinets used to come out there- yes we doubled the size of our kitchen with the changes.  The counters are maple butcher block from lumbar liquidators.  They were int he budget, in the design esthetic, and once we added the tung oil (I will make a post about this because it was a big decision), they looks beautiful.

If we had a legit budget, cabinets would have been ikea (the quality is awesome, they have the look I like), the counters probably a combination of butcher block and quartz (on the left side because of the sink).  The ceiling would be leveled out, the bay window replaced with something more insulated, the wall opened to the dinning room.  See?  Lots of things did not happen, but thats ok.  So far we are looking at under $2000 for the kitchen (sink, counters, new cabinets, paint, subway tile, new range hood).  Not too shabby.  I have a lot of pride in this update since it's been all D and I doing the work, coming up with budget friendly unique solutions. 

And this is where we are now.  A lot of trim and finishes touches left to do, some paint touch ups, grouting, maybe more tiling.  But loving it.