Kitchen Update: What's Done?

SELLER'S PHOTO

Our kitchen needs some work. It's functional, and even in its current state, it's my favorite room of the house, but still, it needs to be brought into the 21st century.

This room is a pretty classic cottage style. It's a galley, but thankfully there's more to it with a peninsula at one side and a classically cottage cubby shelf on the other. The upper cabinets go all the way to the ceiling giving us tons of storage. The lower cabinets are deep and roomy. Good thing too since there are absolutely no cabinets on the other side. The refrigerator and the stove live on that side of the room. Finally, the kitchen is completely open to the dining room, making barstools at the peninsula an obvious choice.

SELLER'S PHOTO

One thing we did manage to do was update the backsplash from the dark and gloomy fake brick stuff, to a bright and happy new subway tile. It took all of my strength swinging a hammer to get that brick out, but it was totally worth it. Combined with removing the painted plexiglass that was passing for a window, it's now clean, and bright. Not a very good pic, but you get the idea,.

We've gone back and forth on what to do in the room. The old fashioned layout could certainly be streamlined and the lack of counter space concerned me at first. We needed some kind of counterspace or storage on the other side of the room. But refrigerator and stove took at almost the whole wall.

The refrigerator, while huge and kind of grubby looking, was actually only a few months old and Energy Star Certified. We decided to replace the stove with one that was actually made within our lifetime and one that would help us save on energy costs. Then we could separate the two appliances. This is a good idea for a number of reasons.  From an environmental standpoint, having the refrigerator and stove right next to one another, is extremely inefficient since it can cause the refrigerator to have to work harder to stay cool. And having space between the two would allow us to bring in some more counterspace and storage. Now we had a bright, clean space, with a new counter top between - a gift from my mom.

So what's next? On the appliance side of the room above, we plan to add a couple of shelves for open storage.We had someone out to look at the cabinets on the other side and he declared them in wonderful condition, built to last, and simply in need of a facelift. Still, the call of brand new, inexpensive Ikea cabinets was almost too much to ignore. But we will. Keeping the old cabinets is more eco minded and keeps them out of the landfill. We'll add beadboard and new pulls to the existing drawers, and build new beadboard cabinet doors. We did a very sloppy mock up of one of the drawers one weekend and this is how it turned out. Note that this was done without measuring, without our drill, and without painting so imagine it done well and you can see that it will really brighten up the space.

Stay tuned for more kitchen changes as we move through this remodel.