FO: My Kitchen

As promised, here is the before and after of my kitchen renovation. I know it’s not knitting but man it brings me a lot of happiness now that it is finished. So here’s the before (excuse the mess because I didn’t think to take before shots until I started packing up!).


And here’s the after…

Every time my mom would see a picture of my fridge she’d say, “clutter.” I get it, you don’t put pictures on your fridge, Mom, but I DO! 😛

We did a complete gut of our kitchen, you can see it all in this Flickr photo album if you want to see start to finish. My husband went out of the country for work on a Sunday and the contractor started on that following Monday. From start to finish was about 4 weeks. Two weeks of a contractor in and out of my house, a week to get the counters cut and installed after they measured and then a week for us to do the backsplash/wall tile work ourselves and then minor touch-ups. It was a lot but the end result was a bright and fresh kitchen that I love.

We mixed textures and patterns with glossy white upper cabinets and a wood grain lower cabinet. The counters have flecks of gray and beige that pick up the lower cabinet colors and the glass tile on the walls brings it all together with brown, greens and grays. My ceilings in my house are mint green, so I love that the glass tile picks up that color too. I’m not a big fan of the color white so I have it sparingly in my home.

My favorite thing is the backsplash and that I convinced my husband to carry it all the way up and around the window. We bought that tile and the floor tile from our local Lowes. My husband installed it and had to create a frame around the window to get the tile to lay out the way he wanted it to and it was a lot of work but I love it. We also did gray grout for the tile on the wall and the tile on the floor. We had to replace the laminate flooring that was there since Ikea cabinets sit on top of the floor and are a little different than a traditional cabinet.

This is an Ikea kitchen (cabinets, sink, counters and fixtures) and we used their contractor of choice but I wouldn’t recommend that to others in the MD/DC area (and I haven’t for everyone who has asked me). They weren’t good project managers, didn’t provide clear schedules and had me coordinate the subcontractors (plumber, electrician, HVAC) and it was always at the last minute. I don’t know about you but I don’t have an electrician in my back pocket 😐 I also hated that they didn’t cover my floors and tracked dirt everywhere so every night when I got home I had to do some major cleaning. How they worked, stressed me out but in the end I’m happy with the final product. The cabinets have pull outs so that I can reach everything in the back of my cabinets. I have deep drawers for baking pans. And since we removed the bulkhead and the cabinets over the island we created a cool cabinet for my serving dishes with a little garage door style cabinet on the bottom hiding my bread machine and teapot. It’s all just so sleek and cool, I’m so happy to cook again.