The Kitchen Refresh: Before Photos
When I shared the inspiration and plan behind our kitchen refresh in last week’s post, I know many of you were like, “Ok, but what does it look like right now?” To tell you the truth, I’ve been nervous to share our kitchen with you. It’s so not reflective of our style that I didn’t even want to put up a full photo!
But now that we’re going to be giving it a makeover, it’s time for me to pull back the curtain and give you a peek into what we’re working with here. I snapped these photos quickly after we had some work done on and around our hood in the island, so these are VERY unstyled, imperfect photos! The worse the before, the better the after though, right?!
To give you some context here, our kitchen is at the back of the house and is open to the rest of our first floor. Our house isn’t huge (a little over 2,000 square feet) and you can see the kitchen from just about everywhere, so you can see why it would be important for it to be a space we love!
Overall I’d say it functions pretty well. It’s really the style that bugs me - those antique glazed cabinets and the busy brown granite are kind of the worst, ha.
The working triangle is good though and we have plenty of storage including a tall pantry to the left of the refrigerator.
The shape of the kitchen is basically two "Ls.” The perimeter cabinets form an L shape and our island is (interestingly) also an L. While a squared off island definitely would have been my first choice, we’ll be leaving that as-is to keep the project fairly simple and straightforward. On the far side of the island is space for three counter stools, which I purchased a few months ago. We use them every day! We love having seating there.
Apart from adding the counter stools, the only other change I’ve made in here was swapping out the island and sink pendant lights for these. The pendants the flippers put in were these ultra contemporary bubble glass cylinders, and they had to go. ;) Even changing out the lighting helped me live with this kitchen for much longer than I originally thought I could - sometimes the smallest change can help us be content with what we have!
As a reminder, this is what we’re cooking up for the kitchen refresh:
So now you’ve seen it, the “before” of our lovely kitchen!
Next up on my to do list is:
Reach out to painters to get estimates on painting our cabinets
Reach out to a cabinet refacing company to get a quote for new door and drawer fronts (we’ll compare pricing between painting and refacing)
Gather samples of materials and hardware to start making some decisions on those, including countertops
It’ll be a little while yet before we have major progress to share as we’re still a few months out from getting the work done, but rest assured, I’ll share it all with you along the way!