Kitchen Reno

When the hubs and I bought our house, we knew that the kitchen wasn't very functional how it was, but loved the built in and craftsmanship done to build the kitchen, but also knew we couldn't have our cake and eat it too.  I definitely wasn't expecting to start it when we did so any plan we had at all was definitely non-existent when this project started.  When we gutted the downstairs bathroom the flooring in that room led into the kitchen and led underneath the cabinets.  The hubs and I tossed around the idea about cutting the flooring to the entrance to the bathroom so we wouldn't affect the kitchen, but that didn't happen...and the first layer of many flooring's came up.  To say the least through all the hard work we ended up with a great kitchen that I absolutely LOVE and use way more then I did before:


So to start from the beginning....

When the laminate flooring came up it left an awesome, not easy to get up, felt crap under it.  Did a little research and the internet said some hot water and a towel will bring it right up...NOT!  At this point I was feeling super overwhelmed by the notion that we would have to rip up the floors...I was ready to light a match and burn the place down.



Then the cabinets came out....and the hubs busted his ass for the rest of the day ripping up each floorboard in the kitchen...which was not an easy job since there were about 100 nails per board.



And this is what was left of the flooring:



The cabinets on the other half of the kitchen I was happy to see go.  They weren't part of the original floor plan and we think were probably put in sometime when the renovation was done upstairs in the 1950's. 



Once we got the flooring cleared out of the room the hubs went to town on the walls tearing down the lath and plaster.  We found out from gutting the downstairs bathroom that the walls the border with the exterior have vermiculite as the insulation in them.  Vermiculite is a pain in the ass to clean up so we opted to not tear down that wall.  Once that was done and cleaned up we were able to move forward with tiling and grouting the floor.  When we looked online some sources said that tiling under the cabinets wasn't necessary and frankly a waste of tile, and others said it didn't matter.  We opted to tile underneath the cabinets to in the future if owners wanted to redo the kitchen they wouldn't run into any shortage issues.

On an interesting note, if you notice the tile in the picture looks similar, we used it in the upstairs bathroom reno, but we didn't figure in that we would be short.  Obviously by the white border our calculations were off which led us into a huge issue before we decided to do the border.  We had seen the tile we bought at Home Depot for months and months, so we figured when we realized we were ONE BOX SHORT, that they would have one more.  NO.  Which is totally our luck, and sent the hubs on a manhunt at stores all around our area trying to find the one single box so we could finish the project.  It didn't happen and we eventually decided on a white border to outline, which actually turned out really nice in the end!  Who knew that a mistake would turn out to work in our favor?!




Once the floors had most of the haze cleaned off, up went the drywall, which led to mudding, sanding, more mudding and more sanding...





And then the day that we were waiting for...CABINETS!!!  We bought the standard Ontario White cabinets from Menards and we haven't had any issues with them!  We totally recommend them for anyone in our circumstances who can't reuse their old cabinets and are looking for something easy to install, clean and look nice!



Once we got the cabinets in, things seemed to go pretty quickly...we went with Numerar Butcher Block counters from Ikea, which we love and the price was super reasonable for our budget!!  We used SomerTile 11.75 x 11.75-in Victorian Subway 1 x 2-in White Porcelain Mosaic Tile from Overstock and we ordered the brushed nickle drawer pulls from Overstock too .  The drawer pulls are bubble clear glass ones that we got from World Market for $15.96/4. We also painted the walls Sherwin Williams Dromedary Camel and love how it turned out!






We replaced our appliances through American with stainless steel/black and love how much more complete they make the kitchen look.

So through all of the blood, sweat and tears of this kitchen reno here is the mostly finished results:



If you notice we didn't paint the trim around the window.  We opted not to because we decided it would look odd with the cabinets and white subway tile.  Although who knows in the future that may change when we decide to replace the windows....eventually....maybe.