Kitchen Renovation Reveal

We have been sick AGAIN. This always happens when David starts teaching at a new school. We end up catching every strain of every virus that goes around. It's like we have to get use to new germs or something. Does that happen to anyone else? Am I making this up?

Here's how it goes down:

David goes to school and teaches all of the children about science. The children have the nerve to breath in David's classroom and touch their papers with their little germy hands.

David brings the germs home. Ford gets sick. I sleep with Ford while he is sick. I get sick.

It's vicious cycle. I blame the children. Enough with education. It only leads to strep throat in my book.

Anyway...

The last room on the tour of farm house is the kitchen. It's also probably the most dramatic transformation of the whole house because we essentially gutted the existing kitchen and started over. We toyed with the idea of refinishing the existing cabinets to save money and then come back later to do a full kitchen overall, but in the end we thought it would be most prudent to just go ahead and bite the bullet.

Biting the bullet, however, caused quite a bit of stress on my part.  I was nervous about the expenses. I was worried that it wouldn't be functional (it's a small space and I'm no kitchen designer!). I wanted to buy quality kitchen cabinets, countertops, sinks, appliances but not break the bank. We were also working fast so I had to make a lot of decisions quickly. Yikes. Holy anxiety attack.

For all the worry, I think it turned out great. We love our kitchen and are amazed at how big and functional it is now compared to when we first laid eyes on it. Let's take a walk down memory lane, shall we?

***All the pictures of the house are taken with my phone. It's the only way I can get a shot in the small spaces. Carry on. ***

And here we are now!

Unlike the rest of the house, the kitchen needed to be drywalled, simply because we needed to hide all of the electrical and water lines that had to be reworked to make the space more functional. Three of the walls are drywalled and the ceiling.

The walls are painted Sherwin Williams "Sea Salt." It's hard to get a good read on the color because of the lighting in these pictures, but in real life it's really lovely and subtle.

The floors are the only thing that we left alone. They still need some repairs, but we've put that off until another day. In hind sight we probably should have just pulled the tile up and continued with the laminate that we used in the rest of the house. 

We decided to go with cabinets from Ikea. It was a lot of extra work to go to Atlanta and then have to put the cabinets together (Thanks Daddy and Jon Jon!) but in the end I'm really happy with them. Ikea has a great price point, lots of style options, and a pretty good quality product. I want the cabinets to last and be durable, but I knew I wouldn't be happy if they didn't look good, too! 

I used Ikea's online program to design the kitchen, which is equal parts entertaining and maddening. I was terrified that everything wouldn't fit, but it did! Victory! 

The cabinets, sink, and countertops are all from Ikea. 

The countertops are Ikea butcher block. I liked the look of butcher block, but I felt like for them to be functional for our family they needed to be sealed. I also liked the idea of having a little bit richer color and I found a few tutorials on Pinterest about staining butcher block, so despite the inevitable anxiety attack it would cause me, I gave it a try. 

I mainly referred to THIS tutorial. It was so helpful. I changed a few things, but I love the end result. They are not perfect, but I think they're charming and so far they've proved to be very durable. I love that they warm the room up a bit. 

I've managed to get a few things up on the wall. (This picture is probably the truest representation of the wall color, FYI). 

Here's the back door, just to orient you to where we are in the house. 

This is a close up of the penny tile that we used for the backsplash. It was an inexpensive tile option and we saved major bucks because I LAID IT MYSELF!! That's right. 

As with the DIY countertops, I was nervous to try this myself, but I found a tutorial and just dove in. Just to be safe, since I had never done this before, I used a very light colored grout matched with the white tile. The tone on tone result is subtle. It just adds a little textural interest to the room. The white on white was also very forgiving of any mistakes that I made! 

In this room we still have a few things that we'd like to accomplish:

- repair the tile floor

- touch up a few paint spots

- arrange the shelves and cabinets for maximum functionality and pretty-ness :)

So that's it! The full tour. 

I'm thankful for the fast and furious way we were able to work and accomplish so much in such a short amount of time, but I'm also looking forward to taking my time decorating and thinking about what projects we want to tackle next. I like being able to live in a space and see how it feels and how my family uses it and then letting that dictate how we decorate and organize. 

This house is starting to feel like home. Thanks for following along our journey. 

mel

{Before Pictures} {Living Room and Dining Room Reveal} {Bedrooms and Hallway}