The first house project is completely finished. I waited until now to post about it because I wanted to show the complete time line from start to finish. Oh yeah, and their is that whole thing about remodeling a kitchen taking up tons of time. The kitchen was the obvious place to start, as a house isn’t much of a house unless you have an operational kitchen. The kitchen was operational, however there was a lot we wanted to improve. I knew it would be the biggest project, so I wanted to get it finished before anything else was started.

Here is the kitchen before. What a sad thing it was. While I am actually a big fan of the color navy blue, it wasn’t quite what we had in mind for the ideal kitchen. We really were turned off by how awkward the kitchen layout was. After Sara and I decided on a new layout (along with the help of my uncle) we started to move cabinets and take out counter-tops. I found a date on our brown sink from 1968. I think it was time for an upgrade.

We maximized the room in the kitchen by moving both the location of the refrigerator and the oven to the opposite wall where a long sliding door shelf and counter-top used to be. This allowed us to have a counter-top that went all the way across one wall, instead of a segmented one. My uncle also built us a shelf for our microwave to clear up more space on the counter. We were able to fit a dishwasher in where the refrigerator used to be and we also added a tiny cabinet on the other side of the dishwasher to brace the counter and to add a little more storage space. If I would have had more money, I would have added an L to one side of the cabinets, but it wasn’t worth the extra cost (lazy-susan + another cabinet = expensive). We managed to salvage all the cabinets but one. Luckily, we didn’t have plans for it.

We did run into a couple of bumps along the way while running a couple of pain in the butt electrical lines and accidentally cutting one of the water lines for the sink. It was actually a good thing that we cut the water line, because now the plumbing is completely redone and leak free. Some of the ceiling cabinets were hard to brace as well because of the wide spacing of the studs in this old house.

We primed over the blue after removing all of the doors and counter-top, then we called in the professional. Sara’s father did a lot of professional painting in his younger years so he applied two coats are our red paint, as we were told it is HARD to make it look good. We used a grey primer to make the red more successful. After squeezing in the couter-top and putting in the sink along with our new space for our dishwasher, there was only one thing left to do. We put all of our cabinet doors back on and painted the trim.

We are very happy with our kitchen now. The whole project we very affordable coming in under $1000. Now we have the other rooms to address.¬? The dining room almost took care of itself as we painted it at the same time as the kitchen. The living room is coming along to, I am sure you will be hearing about that pretty soon.