KITCHEN RENOVATION BEFORE & AFTER

Our kitchen renovation was an intense process for me due to the fact that I don’t do well with disorganization. I knew going into this process it would take at least 4 weeks from start to finish. However, it ended up taking over two months to completely finish the project. Since we were on an extremely tight budget, Tyler and I had to get our hands dirty and take on some diy projects which is why it ended up taking a little longer than expected. We hired an amazing contractor that worked really well with our timeline. When he started the demo of the floors and go into the subfloors we ran into our first problem of the renovation. He informed us that the joists (which are what holds your house up off the ground) were in awful condition. Here's a little backstory on our house...when we had the inspection done on the house they determined the joists under our bathroom and a few other places would need replacing before we could move in. However, they said the kitchen area was fine and didn't need replaced. Jump forward to now and our contractor is showing me that there was previous terminate damage and some of the joists did not even reach from one wall to the other. They were literally just hanging there by nothing!! That meant we had to replace every single joist under our kitchen and butler's pantry, which in turn meant we were going to have to save money somewhere else. I will say it sucks spending money on things you will never see but I now have peace of mind knowing my floors are solid.

One of the ways we saved money was to not demo the existing plaster walls. We still needed to cover them up since there was a good bit of damage to them, but we didn't have to pay for demoing them out. The drywall guy used quarter inch drywall over the plaster walls after he patched up some areas. It ended up looking nice and even with clean lines. We had all new electrical outlets added and replaced throughout the kitchen and butler areas. The plumber add new piping for the washer and sink areas. We had a gas line installed so that one day we can get that dream gas range we've always wanted...but that'll be a few years from now.

I knew from the beginning that I wanted hardwood floors in my kitchen. We did consider tile at one point just because we were scared the hardwoods would looks so different from the original hardwoods already in the house. In the end I couldn't get having hardwoods in the kitchen out of my head so we stressed to our contractor to please get them as close as he could to matching the existing hardwoods. I'm pretty sure he was worried he wouldn't live up to my expectations, but he surpassed them for sure. Obviously they look newer, but give it time, my kids will have them scratched and dented in no time haha.

Onto the kitchen cabinets. My brother-in-law built these gorgeous cabinets in his home workshop back in Pennsylvania. He is a one man show so it took a little longer to get the cabinets but what he built was worth the wait! They are gorgeous! I never dreamt that I would be able to afford custom cabinets and he made it a reality. From start to finish for him it took three or four months to build them and he was down in South Carolina for one week to install them. My whole family of in-laws came down to help that week and Tyler took his vacation It was crazy here that week but it got done. After getting them installed it was time to paint them. We ended up doing the two-tone cabinet colors. For the upper cabinets I went with Alabaster by Sherwin-Williams in a semi gloss finish. For the lower cabinets I really loved this color Cheating Heart by Benjamin Moore so I got Sherwin-Williams to color match and it come out so gorgeous! The paint took several days to do because we had to wait for it to fully dry before doing the second and third coats. On average, it took a full day for the paint to dry enough to do the next coat. The extreme humidity in the South is the reason for the long dry time. For the hardware I ended up going with something from Pottery Barn. I love the antique brass finish. I think it is very fitting for the age of our home.

My Brother in Law also put up the beautiful crown molding which really was a game changer in there. He was able to get it from his work at a super discounted price. We actually have crown molding left over that we plan on using in our dining room when we start that project...hopefully here in the next 2 to 3 weeks so stay tuned.

All in all I LOVE my kitchen now! I included links to everything at the bottom if your interested.

Once the cabinets were installed we had our countertop people come out and measure. After that we had to wait two weeks to get the countertops installed. We went with Calacatta Vintage Quartz countertops. The wait time for installation was about normal but it felt like forever because we were at a stand still until the countertops were in. That meant no tiling and no plumbing gettinh installed. Tyler had already used his vacation up to install the cabinets with his brother so he could only work on tiling the kitchen on his days off. Imagine working somewhere between 50-60 hour work weeks and then on your two days off still working in the kitchen trying to get it done so your wife doesn’t go crazy lol. It officially took about two weeks but technically only four days that were all spread out to install floor to ceiling white 3 x 6 subway tile. After hanging the tile it was time for grouting. We went with a premade grout and I highly recommend it. It saves so much time, and you get a consistent color for the whole project!

All the appliances are new except for the stove and microwave. We went with a counter depth refrigerator because we have such a small kitchen we didn’t need some bulky refrigerator taking up the entire wall. I love the washer and dryer. Our dishwasher is so quiet now that I sometimes put my hand on it to make sure I actually started it.