Kitchen Remodel and Addition – We made it!

Back in 2000, we lived in a different house and had our kitchen there remodeled.  It took about 8 weeks and my oldest son was just about to turn one year old.  It was a very stressful experience and one I wasn’t ready to endure again anytime soon!  Good thing we waited 14 years before doing it again.  🙂  When we moved into our current home in 2004 the kitchen was very small and dark and we knew at some point it was going to need to be changed.  We just didn’t have the resources to do it then and time marched on.  We made do and I kind of grew oddly attached to my quirky 1978 kitchen.  That said, when the opportunity to change our kitchen arose, I was not about to say no!   We met with an architect, got an estimate from our contractors and got started in April 2014.  4 months (and several gray hairs later) the work is complete and I am very excited to share it with you.

Here are pictures of our kitchen right before the remodel:

 

 

You can see from these pictures that the kitchen was galley style, which is an efficient layout for a kitchen, but I wanted to be able to hang out with my family while I cooked and cleaned up and there just wasn’t room for that.

Here are the pictures of our kitchen after!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We bumped out the back of the house about 8ft and we opened up an existing wall that was between our family room and our then-dining room.  It has completely changed the way we live in our home and how we interact with each other.  My children can come down and sit at the island with us, do their schoolwork there, have snacks while I’m tidying up, and so many more things.  It is AMAZING and I couldn’t love it more than I do!!

Any remodel is going to be stressful, it’s pretty much a given, but for the most part ours was fairly smooth sailing.  There were a few things that came up but we dealt with them in stride and everything turned out fine.  The things I personally found the most stressful were choosing our countertop material and the paint color for the walls.  What I wanted for the counter was marble.  Ooooh, marble was so intensely on my brain that it actually permeated my dreams!  We went time and time again to our local stone warehouses trying to find the perfect slab.  I found one that I fell in love with at first glance but the price was astronomical.  My husband looked at me when the quote came in and said, “You don’t seriously want that in the kitchen, do you?  It’s 3x the cost of the cabinets!”  It was tough because I knew he was right but man, that slab was beyond beautiful.  Back to the drawing board for me.  I agonized for months and decided to get a quartz counter because the right piece of marble was too elusive for me to find.  Well, right before we HAD to choose our countertop, my husband convinced me to go ONE more time to the marble place and look so I did.  Good thing I did because lo and behold I found a slab of white carrara marble that blew me away!  Every other piece we had seen was too gray for my taste and I wanted more white with gray veining.  I had found my piece at last!!  We chose to get it in a honed finish and I love, love, love it!  For the first few weeks that we had it, we were terrified about something happening to it.  You hear all these horror stories about having marble counters and they are pretty scary.  To date, we don’t have any stains or etches however we do have plenty of scratches.  These do not bother me at all because they’re just not visible unless you look for them.  Also, I have two teenage boys and they are not gentle or clean in the kitchen and yet, no major calamities have happened.  If you’re thinking about marble but are scared of it, I encourage you to go for it.  I do not regret it in the slightest.  It brings me so much joy and feels so good when I run my hand over it.  LOVE IT!

The marble was our big splurge as we were trying really hard to stay on budget.  We went over budget but that was labor-related and not really to do with our finishes and other choices.  We kept our refrigerator but did get a new dishwasher and range.  Our dishwasher is something else that we chose carefully because, with the kitchen being so open to the family room we needed it to run almost silently.  We got a Bosch and oh my word is that thing quiet!!  Each of us at one time or another have inadvertently opened the door mid-cycle because it’s so quiet that we didn’t realize it was running!!  Now we all know to look for the tell-tale red light shining on the floor to indicate that it is on.

If you have any questions about our remodel, please don’t hesitate to ask them.  I am an open book and will gladly answer any question about the remodel that you have!

Hope all is well in your world!