Our Big Kitchen Renovation: the BEFORE and Construction Details

You guys! This post has been a long time coming! Our kitchen is just about completely finished and I have to admit that it was such an all-encompassing project (along with our regular hectic lives working and raising two busy and active school aged boys), that I haven’t even shared a lick of info on this project, aside from the occasional hint!  Well, that is all about to change, and I’ve got a series of kitchen posts planned for you and am super excited to share all the details about how we gave a dark, cramped feeling space a 180 degree transformation to create a light, bright, airy, open and (I think) amazing family kitchen!  I’m actually getting giddy just thinking about it!  So today I’m here to share the whole background with you – the before pictures along with some construction/progress shots and the plans for changing the layout of this space. Yay, such a fun post to share!

Okay, well let’s get right to it.  If you’ve been reading for a while, then you know that we used in live in a very comfortable (and we thought beautiful) lake front home and then sold that last fall and moved “back into town”, as locals would say.  That is a whole other story, and you can read all about that right here.  It was a stroke of luck, or divine intervention, that the house we moved into came on the market the exact week that we we starting looking (and NEEDED to buy) a new house.  I shared all kinds of reasons for WHY this house was a perfect fit in this post.  One of the things that made it perfect was the large family space it has on the main floor.  Although it’s a traditional front split (or cathedral entrance as my Mom always calls them), it has an addition running along the back of the house that makes the kitchen/dining/family areas much bigger than a lot of these types of homes.  Let’s get on to talking about that kitchen now, shall we?

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, I made this simple layout of our previous floor plan (after the bathroom renovations (read those details here)…

As you walked up the stairs, there was a 30″ glass door immediately ahead that led into the dining room area.  This picture is taking from inside the kitchen, with the photographer facing towards the front door and looking at the dining room from the opposite end of where you would enter it.  You can see the stairs and front door to the left of the image.

Originally, the kitchen was closed off from the previous TV area/now dining room.  It looked like this when we looked at the house…

Directly behind that wall that the stove sits on (above) is the previous owner’s old TV room, which we turned into a dining room instead..

It looked more like this shortly after we moved in…

If you followed along with our bathroom renovation, then you might remember how we took a previous pantry/closet area that was part of the previous dining area, and used it to gain enough space to create a larger master bathroom as well as add a shower to our ensuite.  I shared this picture of us tearing that part of the house open last spring…

Well, we lived in CHAOS for a LONG time.  At least, It felt like a REALLY LONG time.  We started the bathroom renovation last December, the day before New Year’s Eve, and we are finally wrapping up the kitchen now.  Most of the major construction was done by the beginning of June and then it was just waiting on countertops and appliances and doing all the finishing touches.   Anyhow, I ran around the house and snapped these pictures last March just before we moved the old kitchen cabinets out of the kitchen to begin the major construction on that room.  It’s looking quite “lived in” (that’s a nice way to put it, right?), in these snapshots…

At the time that I took these pictures, the bathroom renovations were wrapping up, and we had already taken out the pantry closet so the “eating area” looked like this…

We didn’t actually eat there – we had our dining table in the dining room (behind the stove wall), and this whole zone was kind of a disorganized construction/food storage messy disaster.

I have to admit that going through this process and living IN it was VERY challenging for me as it was just so MESSY and disorganized.  In our previous kitchen renovation, it went a lot more quickly as we did not redo the flooring or take out any walls (though we did remove a door, replace windows, and add a new door), but it was the summer time during that renovation and we were able to be outside for the first really messy part of it.

Anyhow, all that to say that renovating your kitchen is not for the faint of heart, and I’m SO happy we are through all that chaos.  Let’s talk about the changes, shall we?  Like, the big construction/structural ones…

As I shared earlier in this post, this was the old floor plan (post bathroom reno)…

And these were the structural tweaks we needed to make prior to installing our new kitchen…

We began by taking out the small entry door to the kitchen/eating area and opening up the wall between the kitchen/eating area and the living room and it made SUCH A BIG DIFFERENCE! The day it came down… such joy!  I could have cried.  Truthfully, I probably felt like crying most days of this process, but not always in a good way (#halfkidding).

Before/in progress:

And after…

The next step was to replace all the tile in the “new eating nook/bar area”, cover it with paper, and then move the old kitchen cabinets into that space to create a temporary kitchen while we worked on the construction of the main kitchen space…

It was usable and functional, though the living room became a bit tight with our dining table stuffed into it…

In the main kitchen area we had to take down the wall between the kitchen and dining room, close off the door going to the outside, redo the electrical and plumbing and install new drywall on most of the walls and ceilings (for which we hired professionals), and install the new tile on the floor before we could even begin to think about things like cabinets and countertops.

Some construction shots, pre-drywall…

And once drywall was finished, primed, and painted out white it began to take shape again! The window looked so much bigger with the open space – friends and family who come over still can’t believe it’s the same window.

After construction…

Remember that wall before?

After construction…

Remember that wall before?

After construction…

That wall before…

There is no wall there anymore! Yay!!

Whew, a lot of pictures, right?!

I’ll share more details about the cabinet install, appliances, countertops, lighting, island, eating nook, bar area, and MORE with you soon, I promise! But next up I’ll be back to share my “inspiration and plans” for this space.

Here is a small sneak peak at the direction we went…

Off white floor tile
Dekton Countertops by Cosentino
Grey Grimslov Cabinetry from Ikea

Can’t wait to share more!

Have you lived through a major renovation like this?  How did you handle it?  Love it?  Cry daily?  I am finding it’s much like childbirth…now that it’s over I’ve forgotten how much it really hurt at the time.