I wasn't completely in love with the kitchen but I figured if I painted the cabinets, removed the mirrored wall, and replaced the ceiling fan with a cuter light fixture, it would look great. Then we moved in. It's amazing what you learn about a kitchen when you actually use it. Let me explain. Here is a before picture:
That is my son, Andrew, checking out the new digs. Over the sink is an open pass through to the sun room add-on. Oh, and you can see the exterior sliding glass door which leads to the family room. Yeah, that had to go too. Here is another view :
This is a view from the other direction. Doesn't my son, Adam, look cute there - well, now he's all grown up and going off to college. Where does the time go? But in this picture you can see the beautiful mirrored wall. We actually had many mirrored walls in the house to deal with. You can also see a little of the sun room to the left. It's a sun room yet no sun could enter through the layers of window treatments. (Can you say circus tent?). The other side of the kitchen looked like this:
A little dated. But functional. So I thought I could work with it. Until I realized that the counter space between the stove and sink was tiny. And the sink had two bowls - which were too small to actually wash anything. And the dishwasher leaked. The small pantry wasn't going to cut it for a family of six. The strange counter overhang was way to big and preventing us from actually getting a table into the space. Well, the list of problems went on and on. I was beginning to realize that we were going to have to start from scratch. So we ripped out everything - from the white floor tile to the pink granite counter.
It took about two months to complete. And we love it:
We added custom maple cabinets with a beautiful stain, hardwood floors, black granite counters and stainless steel appliances. We reworked the layout to put the stove on the opposite wall from the sink - more counter space. We also have a small overhang for a couple of bar stools. The doorway into the adjoining family room was widened because the old doorway just seemed oddly narrow. Did you notice the cat head cutout in the basement door in that last picture? Well we needed a way for the kitties to get downstairs (And I didn't want it to be a boring square hole).
We solved the pantry storage problem too:
Behind the double doors is the pantry of my dreams. I'll clean that out and take some pictures - but for now trust me -it's good. That used to be a solid wall - and the garage is behind it. We simply bumped it out - much needed storage. Ahh...
We love our new kitchen - and we are so glad we made all of the changes. It is so beautiful and functional.
I linked this post to: http://www.abeachcottage.com. Check it out!