Before and After Kitchen - Repost

Usually between Christmas and New Years we enjoy time as a family doing day trips and just relaxing.  Unfortunately the stomach virus has hit our house and two out of the four of us have been down for the count.  I woke up yesterday feeling horrible and it went downhill from there.  My son got it this morning.  My two nieces also apparently got it yesterday.  Somebody obviously brought more than desert to our Christmas Eve.  This is the first time I have been vertical in over 30 hours.

Here is a repost of our kitchen remodel project.  Hope you like it.

Here is our new kitchen.  It's everything we want.

But it's not where we began.  This is how we began:

Our original kitchen

We built this house almost twelve years ago.  At the time this was exactly what we wanted.  We were young and just so happy to be building a house.  Who knew from granite?   I remember that the big choice with the builder was between formica and corian. We did the standard tiles in the kitchen and standard cabinets and appliances.  It's amazing how much our tastes have changed.  I'm glad we didn't upgrade anything, since a few years ago we gutted the entire kitchen and started over.  We removed all of the tile and put in beautiful hardwood floors and stained them in a dark color.  This was a bigger job than we realized.  If you remove tile to add different tile it's not a big deal because you are only removing the tile.  When you remove tile to put in a hardwood floor, you have to remove the tile, the mud base and the wire beneath.  The day they removed the tile I came home and when I pulled up outside the house the dust and smoke leaving my house was so bad that I thought the house was on fire.

The kitchen is a very large space, but the way it was set up it seemed like two small spaces.  The kitchen had a peninsula which we thought we loved until we really started working in the kitchen and realized it locked the person cooking into one area and separated them from everyone else.

Peninsula which divided the kitchen

 The kitchen also had a desk area.  Sounded like a great idea at the time.  However, the reality was that it was a pile collector.  No one actually sat there and worked.  When we would have parties we would set up the desk area as the bar area with all of the sodas and drinks and ice set up.

Desk area before

This is the after of the same space.  We had the cabinetry wrap the corner and made an actual bar area.  There is a beverage refrigerator and well as two locked cabinets with drinks for any of our over 21 year old friends.  The glass cabinets house my wine glasses.

Another view of the old kitchen

Here is the after.  I still loved the table and didn't really want to get rid of it.  Instead I painted the table base and all of the chairs a bronze color (originally it was grey which didn't go with the new kitchen).  I then reupholstered all of the chairs in a fabric that coordinated with the new color scheme.  The tablecloth is actually no longer on the table - instead I have four place mats that match the window treatment.

Chandelier is by ABC Crystal.  It was perfect for over the huge island.

View of the valance and window treatment over the sink.

It was a huge project.  The project did not go smoothly...at all...there was a very bad middle section, but in the end it turned out just the way we wanted.  Let me know what you think of the kitchen.

-Judy