The Kitchen is Finally Done!

Gold walls, 50 year old cabinets, an older and really thick laminate floor characterized our kitchen when we first moved into our new house. We had great appliances though, so we thought we could just paint the cabinets and go from there. However, as things often happen with remodels, that isn't what ended up happening and we had a 6 month long journey to get our kitchen looking like we wanted it to.

We began in January of 2020.

First we ordered all new cabinets from Lowe's, but used the custom cabinet option from KraftMaid. The designer at Lowe's had some great suggestions about layout and we ended up utilizing most of what he designed for us. I hadn't seen it before (but now it is everywhere!), but I wanted white cabinets with a wood island and wood accents. I wanted to have a modern kitchen, but needed to honor the house because we live in the woods.

Once the cabinets came, demo started. We ripped out everything but the kitchen sink because we wanted to use that while we were under construction.

We also ripped up the floor because the cabinets needed to go on the subfloor and not on top of the laminate flooring.

Since we had ordered an island, we also needed to put electricity to it, so our wonderful friend Victor came and did that bit of electrical work for us. We also needed to lower the microwave and move the drink refrigerator and regular fridge, so Victor did all of that electrical work for us as well.

We also had a lot of work to do on the walls to make them look decent and prepare them for cabinets and the eventual back splash. There was wall paper and the backing from the previous back splash that all had to be pulled down which was not fun work.

But it was finally time to start putting up the cabinets and that was awesome!

My husband constructed these all important supports that helped us hold the cabinets up while we were putting them up on the wall. 

Here is one important thing that I would mention about putting the cabinets up -- we tried and tried and couldn't get the screws to go all the way through the cabinets and into the walls. So after doing a little reading online, I found out that you needed screw wax, but we couldn't find it anywhere. Then I found you could use the wax ring that is usually used for toilet bowls as the screw wax and it worked great! We used two of them for all of the screws that we had to put in, but it was super cheap!

We added a desk into part of the dining room because we didn't have an office. The cabinet people tried to talk us out of it, but it is one of our most used spaces. We have a large screen mounted to the wall and we just love it. And isn't the mail slot cute?



We also had to add a pantry because we didn't have one at all. The double stacked cabinets next to the desk give us a ton of room for all of our goods.

 

This is also my dream kitchen and I love to cook, so we did all sorts of custom builds with a spice rack, double-decker cutlery drawer, and a pull out pantry.
 


Once the cabinets were in, we had to order the counter tops. We used plywood for quite a while in the meantime.



You can also see the handles that we ordered. FYI - Amazon has handles for much cheaper than the hardware stores do. We ordered these and saved a lot of money over what we would have paid somewhere else and the quality is excellent.



The new sink and faucet came from Costco and is a Kohler. I loved the one big sink basin, but I didn't really want to go with a apron style sink. I liked the clean modern lines of this one.


All of this took until the end of February, then tragedy struck. While my husband was cutting the crown molding to put above the cabinets, he used a table saw in a way in which he shouldn't have, and it ended up pretty much mangling his right hand. We had to call 911 and he was taken by ambulance to the hospital where he had emergency surgery. My daughter had actually done her surgical rotation with the doctor who performed my husband's surgery and said that she was one of the best. He ended up losing a couple of tips of his fingers, but after months of rehab and doctor visits, he is back to doing work just like he did before.  (Please note the barbecue sauce that he is pointing to!)

Big thanks to Steve who helped us finish the crown molding! We couldn't have done it without him!


Also -- I bought him these little Table Saw tools that help you push the wood in so that your fingers don't get close to the blade. I knew he would use the darn table saw again! I know you can get tables saws that have automatic stops on them, but they are a couple thousand dollars! I guess it would have been cheaper than the surgery in the long run though.

It was now March and COVID-19 struck. We couldn't go out to get the supplies we needed to keep working on the kitchen, but then we talked to the place where we wanted to get the floor and they said that they would do all contactless pickup. So we did that.
 
The flooring is Stonescape Mountain Mist from Provenza: a laminate and 100% waterproof. Although we wanted to, we couldn't really do a wood floor because it wouldn't match with the wood in the rest of the house (still not done).

We decided to add a bar to the island with a curved edge. We got Radianz MontBlanc Snow quartz from Peak Stone Company.  It's got little sparkles in it and looks so good with the under cabinet lighting.


The last thing was to install the back splash. We decided to go with a light gray glass tile - 3"x 12" with a silver colored grout. Instead of the typical tile adhesive, we used MusselBound Adhesive Tile Mat and it was amazing! It was so much easier to use than the other type of adhesive. I would highly recommend this for any wall tiling.



We also used Armacost under cabinet lighting from Home Depot.

The finished product!