Before and After

So, once upon a time, we remodeled our kitchen. We finished it about a year ago, I just haven't posted pictures of the project yet. When we bought our house the kitchen was the first project I wanted to get started on. It was monochomatic and not in a good way. The previous owners had sort of done a remodel but it was just ugly and weird. They mixed styles that did not work well together. The natural light in the kitchen is gorgeous and nothing they did to the room showed that off. I wanted something bright and cheery to get me through the long winter months we have in Utah. I am so pleased with the end result. We did all of the work ourselves. My mom came out before we started any of the projects to help pick a pallet and get things moving. Josh's sister and mom also helped us paint our cupboards. We were grateful for the hours they put in. We didn't realize what a project this was going to be until we were deep in it, which was probably a good thing. It really was a lot of work, but was so so worth it.

Before:
The walls and the cupboards were the same color, it was just so dang boring to look at. The room made me cringe. The peek-a-boo cupboards had plastic windows instead of glass, ew.

We had to fix some of the lighting and get rid of the dome light in the center. The fridge didn't fit the space it was given and was way too tiny for our needs. The window coverings did nothing to prevent people from looking in from the outside. It was like living in a fish bowl, you could see right in.

The combo of the backsplashes was just odd. They did a tumbled travertine right next to a modern subway tile, with a marble counter top. It was horrible. There was no range hood.

The work:

These pictures are all out of order but oh well.
These are just some, yes some, of the nails we had to pull out of the floor the house came with when we tore it out.

We had to tear through 4 layers of floor in the kitchen (yep, they just kept putting new floor on top of the old ones), re-secure beams and replace the sub-floor, do a layer of underlayment and then lay our floors (which are gorgeous), and put up baseboards.

We had to use many things to get those pre-existing layers of floor up.

My job for most of the floor work was to pull all the nails out. There were thousands and I spent days doing it. I thought for sure I was just going to want to burn the house down by the time we finished this project. It was tedious but again, worth it.

To get one of the layers of linoleum up we had to burn it off to melt the tar that held it down. It was an adventure.

We painted cupboards and scraped old wallpaper off.

Josh tore out the old backsplash.

He built this contraption in the stairwell that leads to our basement so he could vent our new range hood outside. I was freaking out the whole time, thinking surely the thing was going to collapse and he would end up paralyzed.

Installing our new backsplash.

This is a rare moment so I had to document it. Josh doesn't take a break to eat, drink, or use the bathroom until his project is finished. I must have made him sit.

Along with all of that we replaced the blinds, replaced the plastic in our cupboards with glass, painted the walls, fixed and added lighting, installed new appliances including a fridge and a range hood, raised cupboards, added molding to the top of the cupboards that didn't reach the ceiling, and I'm sure more that I can't think of at the moment.

After:

Check out the floors, we love them.

We went with a glass tile backsplash that makes me smile every time I see it.

The only projects left are getting the painting I did for this room framed and hung, and figuring out what to do with the inside of the glass cupboard. Who knows if those 2 things will ever happen.