Well, the daydreaming about my kitchen has quickly escalated into a bit of a nightmare. While I know I will LOVE what we end up with, this is going to be a terrible, horrible, no good, very long few months.

So, this post will only cover the before stuff, as just getting to where we can start to see some afters is going to take time…and patience…and perserverence…among other things. Here is what we bought:

That’s right. That loveliness was all ours and I know you’re jealous.

• Jealous of our nice, low 8′ stippled ceiling
• And our plywood cabinets held together with these awesome magnets:
• And our lovely pink laminate countertops
• And that behemoth microwave (that had leaves in the vent when we took it down the other day – not. even. joking.)
• And jealous of my non existent pantry (if you look closely at the image on the left, you can see my shelves in the old dining room where all of our food was stored until we started demo a few weeks ago.

The Vision

I knew when we first walked in this house that this room was going to require a lot of love. We had done it once before in the old house but that was all finishes. Here’s the before and after of that:

But this kitchen was going to require a whole new level of vision. And I was absolutely up to the challenge.

If you know me, you know this room is my happy place. It’s where I create love for family and friends (and sometimes strangers through the meals ministry) and it just makes me happy to be in an awesome kitchen. As a matter of fact, the first time I met my husband Drew was at his house and when I walked into his mother’s kitchen I literally said “I am not leaving here until I cook a meal in this kitchen.” And that very evening he drove me to the grocery store and I whipped up some yumminess that may very well be why he fell in love with me (the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach seems pretty true to me).

So here is what I envisioned in this house:

• Opening up the space between the great room and the kitchen. When we started there was this: a single door pass-thru to the kitchen and a double wide pass-thru to the dining room.
• Completely getting rid of the dining room to create an enormous kitchen for myself.
• Getting any and all height in the ceiling that we could.
• New every-single-square-inch-of-everything-in-the-space.
• Clean, modern lines to keep with the feel of the house

So that’s where we began.

Demolition

We watch a LOT of home improvement shows. If my TV is on it’s either turned to HGTV or the cooking channel while I’m in front of it (or History Channel for Forged in Fire which is my new favorite show…and yes, I plan to find some place in the ATL where I can forge my own knives one day). So when we watch our shows and they start to tackle a renovation with a sledgehammer, Drew is always commenting that it’s stupid to demo like that because of the mess.

We discovered however that when you start with super shoddy cabinets (which we had) that were put in by people with talent the level of circus monkeys (which we did) a sledgehammer actually makes a lot of sense. So we sledged away and managed to get here in one weekend:

and last night we ripped out some more drywall so we could get a feel for what the space will feel like when we get the opening widened and here we are:

Next up will be framing in the new header so we can rip the wood out and then getting the entire room rewired and insulation sprayed up into the ceiling so we can put the new drywall up and have a much taller room (yippee). Hopefully I’ll be able to post more progress next week.

In the meantime, the kitchen is closed. Sigh…