If you’ve been following me on Instagram, Facebook or Twitter you have seen some of the kitchen demolition photos. This is a post to introduce you to the kitchen remodel before photos.
Remodeling this kitchen has been something I wanted to do since buying my house in September of 2009; it was the one room of the whole house I didn’t like at all. Not even a little.
I know what you will think when looking at these photos because I do it, too, why don’t they just clean up?! After a while it just became a drag choosing whether I should use cabinet space for dishes or food, keeping smaller appliances and a pantry in the basement, and having times when I couldn’t avoid my own counter clutter and just lived like a slob.
Sure if I kept it looking un-used like the listing photo maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, but that wasn’t practical every day living. And all the stuff not in the kitchen and the rest of the house was crammed into the basement to the point there was only a path to move to the furnace and garage door. Not fooling me, sellers!
People asked me what I didn’t like about this kitchen. Besides it meeting the basics of having a sink and appliances, it was not the most functional space for me who prepares most of my meals at home and wants to be able to entertain.
Also the paint color annoyed me and I could have painted, but the last thing these walls or cabinets needed was ANOTHER layer of paint!
To walk into the kitchen, you step up approximately 2.5” because they laid ceramic tile on top of previously flooring. This meant the refrigerator did not slide all the way back into its space because of the top hinges and the fridge took up part of the entry way.
You could even see it in the real estate photos.
The entry way was part of a non-load baring wall that separated the kitchen and dining room and that had a pass-through window that was not original to the house. If a previous owner was going to take the time to cut mesh lath and plaster to create a window, why not remove the wall?
Some of the nearby houses have the wall cut back to counter depth, but I haven’t seen one taken out completely. I also haven’t paraded through all my neighbors’ homes.
The split corner sink took up a lot of counter space and as a left-hander with the garbage disposal on the left bowl, my arm always crossed the water stream to access the faucet until I became better at using my right hand on the water.
This particular faucet was not appropriate for the small and shallow sink bowl. It was too high and too close to the edge of the bowl so that when washing a 9×12 pan, I always splashed water outside of the sink no matter how careful I tried to not to.
Above the sink was a cabinet hung below a 14” soffit so when you leaned toward the sink you had to make sure you didn’t hit your head on the cabinet. Also, the base cabinet door was never affixed properly and a few weeks after moving in water came gushing out of the cabinet because they never installed the garbage disposal correctly. Much of the work in this house was not well done.
Speaking of oddball details, there was a door that I called the troll door next to the fridge that I put my trash and recycling cans, but if you looked at the tile floor, you would see that instead of removing the door trim when they installed the tile, they just notched out the tile. Of course, removing the trim would mean cutting through approximately 6 layers of paint.
Above the fridge, which is the space of the stairs leading to the second floor, they installed another smaller troll door with only three sides of trim. This door served no purpose because inside was only a 2×6 to balance items on.
Yes, I kept a lot of crap on my fridge and I plan to not use the new fridge as landing spot for paper clutter. But I did enjoy finding photos that fell behind the fridge like a time capsule!
So yes while I could make it work for nearly six years, is is time to improve this space! The exciting thing as of this post, I don’t actually know what the final look will be other than what I can guess from drawings.
