Monday, August 1, 2011

First Kitchen Remodel

today we are happy to feature Good Clean Fun's kitchen. hop on over the www.goodcleanfuneating.blogspot.com for some quick, easy (mostly) healthy recipes!

we are about to move out of a house we have spent 4 1/2 of of 7 years as a married couple. this is the first house that truly felt like home to me. the whole move has me a little apprehensive. i am hoping our "new old house" will feel like home just as this one has.

before we go, i wanted to share our kitchen remodel. as a personal chef and food blogger with a hint of wanna be fixer-upper, i use my kitchen a lot!

for the record, here is what the kitchen looked like when we bought the place 4 1/2 years ago. (after hours of searching for the before pictures on my computer and external hard drive, the photo has vanished and i am so mad! i have a photo of every other room in the house but the kitchen before photo is nowhere to be found.)
but, here is a glimpse through the living room doorway - note the fake brick, dark cabinets, and absence of upper cabinets.


we bought this house under two conditions. 1) all the wallpaper had to go. there was seriously wallpaper in every room of the house, there was even wallpaper on the ceiling of the half bathroom. 2) the kitchen had to be gutted and re-done.


thanks to a lot of sweat and hard work from my dad, we were able to do all the demo ourselves. truthfully, the demo was fun. something about taking a sledge hammer to dry wall is oddly gratifying. tearing down drywall is a heck of a lot more fun than putting drywall up. as a matter of fact, it's such a dirty, dusty, nasty job that requires lots of spackling precision, i have now vowed to leave all future drywall to the experts.


we knew this wouldn't be our "final house" (is there really such a thing? - i hope not!), so i didn't want to go all out with top of the line everything. the counters are laminate and the oven/stove isn't the viking i hope to one day have, but i love this kitchen! it's cozy and functional while still managing to have quite a bit of counter space.



some of the features i love are:


the pull-out trash/recycling
this is now a "must" for me in the kitchen. it's so convenient!


slim pull-out
a great use of what otherwise would have been wasted space. i can fit so many things in this pull-out!


drawers in place of cabinets
i love drawers instead of cabinets. they eliminate being unable to see everything.

one thing is would have done differently?


hanging glasses
yes, they look pretty and save cabinet space, but since i cook a lot, it seems they are always dirty. i find myself having to constantly clean them. ugh.

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