Thursday, April 01, 2010

The great kitchen reveal: The before

The beauty of HGTV is that they make any project take a weekend to complete. In honor of them I've decided to take you through our project at an accelerated pace. In the next 5 days you will all experience what the ear doctor and I went through for the last 5 months.

Today: the before

This is the kitchen we were working with when we bought the house on October 23rd. Entering the room from the dining space:




The flooring in the kitchen was almost a full inch higher than the original hardwood flooring in the rest of the house. The previous owners had installed a really ugly dog gate between the rooms that made me think the kitchen floor had been peed on a million times. Gross. That tile was the first thing in my mind that had to go.

Looking from the doorway through the room:




Really, it didn't seem that bad at first glance. We'd seen SOOOOO much worse during our house hunt. It was cluttered and worn down, but not horrible.


What we didn't realize was the wall with the stove had no lower cabinets or electricity in the wall. The previous owners left us the stainless steel prep table in the right hand corner. In order to use any small kitchen appliances they'd taped a strip of outlets to the underside of the table. Yuck. Really inconvenient. That had to be changed.

Next we have a crappy picture of the existing sink and window:





That horrible soffit above the sink had two glaring lights with those energy saving bulbs sticking out. It was so ugly and made the window seem so small. Probably because the window was really small. We ended up ripping out the soffit and doubling the size of the window. I just love a light-filled kitchen.

All of the cabinets were hung willy nilly and none of them had backs. When you opened the doors you could actually see the plaster wall in the back of the cabinet. I would have loved to save something, but everything was so work down and rickety we weren't able to salvage a thing.

And to give you a final overall idea of the whole room I mashed this photo together

3 comments:

Chelsea Junget said...

Can't wait to see the after!

TRS said...

Ooooh. I can't wait for the Reveal! Hurry hurry!

Mrs. Architect said...

Gah! Such a tease!!! I'm DYING to see the final product!!!