Before & After: Kitchen

The Kitchen was one of the things that I loved most about this house when I first saw it. Not really for what it was at the time but for the potential I saw in it. It is a really big room, with plenty of space for a table and tons of cabinet space. I love the counter on the left side. It's nine feet of pure food prep space! I didn't even have half that much space in our whole Memphis apartment kitchen! No more trying to figure out where to lay 5 dozen cookies to cool. Thanksgivings at my house this year!




This is what the Kitchen looked like when we first bought the house.



Then we did this. Yikes!



We really messed up the walls when we took off the wallpaper but we couldn't really help it. I was just hoping for a miracle and we found it in the form of my Father-in-law, the Super Spackler. He patched up the walls and sanded for what must have felt like an eternity. Then his electric sander decided it had had enough and gave out so he continued sanding by hand. I think we might have to put his name on the deed now!



Tyson's mom, Susan, spent lots of time taking care of kids so they wouldn't be under foot. We couldn't have done it without her!



The floor had a big bulge in it that we thought had been caused by water damage but once we got looking at it we realized the floor was built wrong in the very beginning. They even made the cabinets a little higher on the one side of the kitchen to compensate for the builders error. It's not like the floor is going to fall in or anything, it just looked funny. So Bill spent hours with his belt sander trying to even out the floor....and it actually worked. You can't even tell there was a bulge there anymore.




Then we started on the painting. We put Pimpernel on the bottom and Antique White on the top.




Then Tyson and Bill started laying the floor. This is Tuscan Stone Bronze laminate flooring. I saw it at Home Depot and loved it.



I happened to have the camera out the one time they cut the piece totally wrong. So here they are blaming each other.



Susan has some fancy trick she does to make cabinets look like new. Something to do with Bees Wax, Orange Oil and Steel wool. Whatever it is, it's a miracle cure! The cabinets look really fantastic!



And finally the moment we've all been waiting for. Here is the almost finished room. We still need to put the baseboards on and install a dishwasher, and fix the cupboard that mysteriously got broken during the floor installation.