House Remodel - Kitchen, Dining Room and Living Room

Here is the remodel post I know at least a few of you have been waiting for.  We started remodeling the kitchen by demoing walls and tearing things out back in January.  We were completely without a kitchen for about 6 weeks, I think, back around March, but then there has been quite a bit of finish stuff since April or so once we had a functioning kitchen again.  Paul did all the texture, trim, crown, baseboard, electrical (there were maybe 6 lights total in the whole kitchen/living room when we bought the house), wall framing and painting.  We hired out the cabinet install (cabinets were ordered from Lowe's, just like with our last house - they are KraftMaid brand), tile install for the backsplash and quartz countertops, and hardwood floor installation (which was a nightmare).  I tried to match up before and after angles as best I could. You can see in the first two photos that the old kitchen was kind of a boxed in little compartment with a hallway and laundry closet on the left (which we relocated to another part of the house near the guest bathroom in order to expand the kitchen and use that space for the refrigerator and pantry space).

 

The walls weren't load bearing (hooray!) so we just knocked them down ourselves and opened things up and reorganized where appliances went.  The new sink is where the old stove was.  The new stove is in between where the old fridge and ovens were.  And I love that we have bookshelves in the island to hold my cookbook collection and make the island look even a little more like a piece of furniture to flow between the kitchen and living room.

The picture below is just of a wall with a doorway, but I'm posting it to show the change we made by tearing that wall down and opening the dining room into the kitchen which you can see in the following picture.  Oh, and you can also see the old door to the garage and the new white one.  Paul installed all the new doors in the house except for the front door and the double French doors in the living room.

Here is another angle from the old kitchen, followed by a really similar angle in the remodeled kitchen to better show the difference in some of the appliance configurations.

Oh, and that beautiful wood paneling was actually TWO layers thick.  It was beastly to rip it out and haul it away (I helped with a lot of the brunt labor of carrying out spiky chunks of that disgusting paneling to the backyard and then we had a bunch of help from friends in our ward who came to cart the trash heap from the backyard to a dumpster in the front one Saturday morning so it could all go to the dump).

Our furniture in the living room is a little embarrassing - its mismatched and the couches only cost us $50 at a garage sale down the street shortly after we moved in and had this empty room where we were just sitting on camping chairs for the first couple of months.  We plan to get a rug and new couches at some point but we are just going to have to wait on that for a while.  Also, you can see around the window that the trim hasn't been totally finished and we plan to paint the dark wood trim white because there are a few other windows in the house with various shades of brown trim that should all match.  Again, that's a project that is just going to have to be put on the backburner while we tackle other more pressing matters.

The fireplace before was so blah - it just blended in to the wood paneling too much.

But without ANY changes to the fireplace it looks so much better just by being surrounded by the clean grey walls and having one of our favorite Yosemite pictures decorating the mantle.  I'm just realizing that I really need to organize that bookshelf though.

There are garbage and recycling bins in a pull-out drawer on the far right and a lazy susan in a corner to maximize cupboard space.

And that is pretty much it for the remodel pictures for now.  Paul still has a little baseboard to install in the family room before we can replace the carpet and finish that area.  But here are the rest of the pictures I took of the kitchen/living/dining room this morning of some different angles that I don't have matching "before" photos for.

And that's it!  Hats off to Paul for all his hard work!  I am LOVING the new kitchen and making good use of it.