We always knew that we would eventually remodel the kitchen to fit our lifestyle better, but the thing that triggered it to happen at this point in time was the condition of the living room carpet.  It was time for the carpet to go, and if we did that we wanted hardwood flooring, and it did not make sense to put harwood in the living room and not do the kitchen (we hated the white floor tiles), and if we were going to redo the kitchen floor, we might as well reconfigure the kitchen!

Our original kitchen was more of a “W” where the new kitchen is more of a large space with two islands.  It is so much easier to get groceries into the kitchen now.  I also don’t like people in the kitchen when I am cooking.  The new island provides enough bar space for everyone to hang out, and it provides better workspace for me to do all my prep work.  Overall the new kitchen is 100% usable, where with the old kitchen I needed to drag a table into the kitchen when I was cooking for a holiday or party.

One of the biggies for us was to always have a functioning kitchen as we went through the remodel process.  We planned the project in 3 phases, and we made it work by doing all the work ourselves.  We are lucky to have a big shop and a 2 car garage.  We built all the cabinets in our shop, and staged them for each phase in our garage.

We also wanted our new kitchen to be unique and totally “us”.  My husband is a woodworker, so he made all the trim and specialty pieces, like the range hood cover and the spice racks.  He also made the three concrete countertops.  I am artsy/craftsy and made all the tiles (a mixture of ceramic and glass), stained glass windows, soap dispensers, sponge holders, and switchplate covers.

We had a couple of big ticket items that we knew we had to have in our kitchen, like the Wolf range and the soapstone island and sink.  But there were other areas where we found we could trim costs, like the cabinet and drawer pulls, and assembling the pendant lights ourselves.  it still cracks me up, but we really didn’t want to replace the refrigerator because it was not more than a year old, but we really didn’t want a white one in our new kitchen, so I covered it with appliance film and you really cannot tell the difference!

Like I said, we did all the work ourselves, mostly on weekends because we both work full time, and there were days we were just thrashed.  I can remember how happy we were to get the kitchen done and “only” have the flooring left to do.  Ha, ha.  We had to glue down our bamboo flooring (very messy) and we not only did the kitchen, we did the dining room, living room, hallway, and up the stairs.  Looking back, we probably should have hired someone to do the flooring for us.  It was, by far, the hardest part of the remodel.