House Pictures Before and After: the KITCHEN

Continuing on the house tour of befores and afters, let me introduce you to.....

....the KITCHEN.

Ah yes, the kitchen.  What a beauty it was to behold when I first bought this house....see for yourself:

Doesn't this just SCREAM beautiful? (dripping with sarcasm).  The z-brick, the beautiful TINY oven, the ugly refrigerator...well, beggars can't be choosers, and this was my first house....so I made do with what I had.

This second picture actually shows the original yellow linoleum that was "on" the floor.  I say "on" because it was worn so thin in some spots you could see through to the sub-floor.

But, a kitchen remodel was out of our budget for the time being, so we really made do with what we had...we replaced the refrigerator and started dreaming about what we would do differently:

Despite it's visual un-appeal, we still entertained in the house...the kitchen is a wonderful size, it just wasn't very nice to look at...

But, we made it work.

Then, in 2008, with a 6 month old on our hands, we got all crazy and decided we wanted to tackle a full kitchen remodel.   Did I mention we were crazy?

There is no good way to remove Z-brick.  As you can see above, there is quite a residue that remains after it has been taken off the wall (they glue it on)...

So, we were forced to go down to the studs.  Because of the beams in the ceiling, we also had to tear out the ceiling and put a new one in...see...we ARE crazy. 

With a lot of elbow grease and some magic cleaner I found, I scrubbed the cabinets into looking pretty again and re-used them!  We put in laminate flooring (see little Max 'helping'?).  And slowly but surely, the kitchen got put back together again...

 

Here it is with the finished countertops!  But my 'after' pictures really don't do the full remodel justice.  Lucky for me, we have the house listing photos to show it off :)

The back splash is beige and green glass tiles.  I LOVE it.  It fits perfectly with everything.  Max made some crown molding for the top of the cabinets, and they look brand new!

 

We put can lights in the ceiling when we redid it which really help add light to the kitchen...and the dimmer switch is the icing on the cake!

 

The size of our kitchen is phenomenal.  Seriously.  Looking at other houses, we haven't found A SINGLE KITCHEN that can even COMPARE in size to ours...why are we moving again?

 

Of all the remodels in our house, the kitchen is probably the one I am the most proud of.  Originally, we had thought of just painting over the z-brick (rather than having to tear everything out).  I am SO GLAD we decided to just do it right and do it all the way.  It was totally worth it in the end.

Oh yeah, and one of the houses that came up on our recent search had z-brick in the kitchen.

We won't even consider it.

LOL