Before and After - Kitchen

Seriously, when I look back at these pictures I wonder why we ever bought this house.  It was ug-ly!  Anyway, here is what our kitchen space looked like when we moved into our house in 2007:

{the view into the kitchen from the then dining room, looking at the side of the fridge}

{the awkward placement of the fridge partially hid the window that looked into the carport and it's horribly broken mini blind}

{white cabinets, white laminate countertops and backsplash, linoleum tile flooring, gold cabinet hardware}

{the one saving grace of the kitchen - stainless appliances}

Over the years, I painted the kitchen several colors, including a bold red (which I am embarrassed to even admit) and then blue (which looked a lot lighter on the paper swatch than it turned out).

I love to cook and spend a large chunk of time each day in the kitchen, so when we pulled our house off the market, I knew we had to do some updating/remodeling to make the kitchen a better space.  Our kitchen's layout is anything but ordinary due to an addition that was built at some point.  While we would have loved to have torn out the entire kitchen, office nook and laundry room to create an amazing open kitchen, we had a budget to stick to.  That plan would have forced us to move waterlines (and with a concrete slab that more expensive), buy all new cabinetry, alter/raise the roofline, even the flooring (the laundry room is slightly sunken) and could easily have cost upwards of $30,000.  So with our budget in mind, here's what we came up with:

We painted the kitchen a warm tan that coordinated well with the tile and natural stone backsplash and granite countertops.  In order to keep the costs down, we opted to keep the cabinets since we were fairly new and still in good condition.  As with the family room, we ripped up the linoleum tile floor and had engineered wood floors laid.

{a view of the prep side of the kitchen, FYI - the granite isn't as gold in real-life as it appears in pictures}

We removed the random window which looked into the carport and re-oriented the position of the fridge so that you see the front rather than the side.  Still left to do, we're going to add narrow cabinets to the right of and above the fridge to create a pantry.  This will give us more storage (sweet!) and make the fridge look like it's built-in versus randomly stuck on a wall by itself.

We also created an arched doorway (which matches the one from the living room into the hallway) so that the kitchen opens directly into the new dining room.  When we had our house on the market, a prospective buyer remarked that our house had an odd flow.  We hope that by adding this doorway, and thus creating a circular flow, we have remedied that problem.

Counter space is always at a premium in a kitchen and not having a built-in microwave ate up valuable space.  When we were planning our renovations to the kitchen, we decided it was well worth it to tear out the old vent hood and add a microwave vent hood.

The original kitchen still had the original cabinetry while the kitchen addition had new cabinets.  To make the two areas look more cohesive, we removed the upper doors of the old cabinets and painted the backs of the cabinets. At some point, I'm going to replace the old lower cabinets' doors so that they match the new cabinets.

But probably my favorite part of the entire kitchen is the new sink and faucet.  I love it!  While I would love to have a porcelain farmhouse sink (next house!), this sink was free when we bought our countertops.  The faucet is Moen and it doesn't leave fingerprints or smudges - seriously, I think I've only cleaned it like twice in the 10 months we've had it, which I realize is simultaneously gross and awesome.