Remember our Kitchen Project?

Remember last year when we started working on our kitchen? To be honest it's still not completely done... but we haven't been working on it all this time. We got it fairly far along pretty quickly (for us). Finishing projects is much more motivating when you can't really eat until you make progress. The project got to the 'we just have a few small finishing touches left' stage and then we stopped working on it. I haven't posted the 'after' pictures on purpose as motivation to get the project all the way done.

Reality and a new baby have set in so... here are the after pictures anyway. Filling the holes in the ceiling and touch up painting very likely will take a year more to finish. I may be lazy but at least I am becoming a bit more realistic. I'll take any small victory.

My post about starting this project wasn't entirely true. We had done a few things to the kitchen. We took down the wallpaper border soon after moving in; then we discovered that the entire walls were wallpapered under the paint. There was a thin coat of drywall mud over each seem to hide it. It took us forever to get that layer of wallpaper off... then we painted the walls. We kept the kitchen at that stage for about four years.

These are the pictures of the kitchen as it was when we first saw it. When I dug them out and showed them to Brian he said, "I can't believe we were dumb enough to buy this house."

We are not sure why some of the cabinets were painted green and some weren't.

This is a closer view of the counter tops (I love how the former owners didn't bother to throw the garbage away... why did we buy this house?) As you can see the grout was super thick and super dirty. I scrubbed it thoroughly after we moved in but I was never satisfied. For over four years I never once put food directly on the counter tops, they just weren't clean enough. They also were not level, you had to put a glass in the center of a tile or it would tip. The day these counter tops were busted out was my happiest house day ever.

I don't have any 'during the project' pictures. Just imagine us working super hard. We didn't gut the kitchen (as much as I would have like to) but I do think we did pretty well with our limited budget.

Here are the 'after except for a few minor things' pictures:

I love that the counter tops are smooth and clean, that my pots now fit under the microwave, that the giant fluorescent light box is gone, and that all the doors and drawers work. At the outset I couldn't talk Brian into including new flooring into the plan/budget. As soon as we got everything pulled together he said, "the new paint and counters make the floor look worse than it used to."

Let it be written that it was Brian's idea to replace the floor... whenever we get to it.