So now that you’re all pretty much caught up on what’s been happening, I thought I would talk just a little bit about our plan for the space starting from the floor and going up from there.
- Floor: We are going to carry the laminate that’s currently in the rest of the house into the kitchen/dining room. I was a little concerned about laminate in the kitchen but I think it will be fine and we’re installing it so that the last row will go by the sink/dishwasher so it will be easy to pull up and replace if we have a leak in the future.
- Cabinets: We are going to have drawers all the way around the kitchen with the exception of the lazy susan and the sink cabinet which will both have cabinet doors. We picked up the cheapest, in stock drawers from Lowe’s and will work with them for the next few years until we can afford to upgrade (remember, this remodel was not planned and we’re trying to stay as cheap as possible so that we have to finance little to none). We’re going to paint them the same color green that we are putting on the lower half of the dining room walls so that we have one color all the way around the bottom half of the space (the two spaces make up one big room). I ordered some drawer pulls from Amazon but they are coming straight from China so it’ll be another few weeks – a month before they get here. On either side of the fridge we’ll build floor to ceiling pantries with a cabinet over the fridge.
- Counters: The counters are what I’m most nervous about. We are going to attempt DIY-ing some wood counters using 2x lumber. If they end up working out, I’ll give you guys more details about how we built them. I’m really hoping we can start them this weekend or next week but we’ll see! Depends on how cabinet installation goes.
- Walls/Upper Cabinets: We are going to be tiling the entire wall above the counter on both sides of the “L” cabinet layout. We’re using white penny tile with a light-medium gray grout. We decided not to use upper cabinets and are going to use open shelving instead. I’m really not a fan of open shelves but Kyle likes the idea of them; I think they can be pretty but thinking about how much animal fur is floating around our house at any given moment just kind of grosses me out thinking about it on our dishes. We’re compromising by installing shelving but using it for cook book storage, canisters, and glasses that we can keep overturned (assuming our cats don’t climb up and start knocking stuff off which is a major possibility).
- Stove hood: We had a stainless steel under cabinet hood which we will be using as an insert into a new hood cover that we are planning on building out. Most of the time, hood covers are built out of wood or they can be drywalled/plastered to match the surrounding walls. We decided to try something a little different and we’re going to tile the hood cover using this patterned tile. I’m usually not huge into patterns but I thought this might be fun.
I think that’s pretty much it. We also removed the giant 70s/80s rectangle fluorescent light and replaced it with 3 recessed lights and I’m planning on painting the doors to the deck green to blend in with everything else. Then of course there’s all of the small stuff like changing out the window trim, plumbing the sink, and installing the faucet I picked up on clearance before we even knew we’d be redoing our kitchen.
Here is what I’m hoping we’ll accomplish over the next two weeks (mostly weekends):
• Install drawers
• Prime/paint drawers (already started)
• Finish smoothing the ceiling
• Build first of 3 counters (more if we can)
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