Last week when Husband was traveling, I woke up early one morning to find the light was perfect in our kitchen. So I grabbed my camera to capture a few of the moments while I cooked breakfast. I decided it was the perfect excuse to finally share pics of our kitchen renovation.
If you don’t know anything about our house, it was built in 1935. You can read about the history of the home here or see pictures from before we bought the house in this post. (Please note the strawberry contact paper as I spent hours getting that stuff off the walls!) When we moved in, we painted the house a classic palette using lots of blues with red accents. It wasn’t very ‘us,’ but it definitely did the trick.
Then last year, we decided to move (we didn’t), so we thought we should redo the kitchen. While this may seem counter-intuitive, you should know that one of the only rooms in your house that you can actually invest money in and expect to get it back at selling is the kitchen. A nice kitchen is a must-have on virtually every home buyers list, but it’s such a big investment, not to mention a pain to have that room torn up, that most buyers will never want to do the work themselves.
Homeowner Tip: If you can redo it yourself, update the kitchen before you put your house on the market.
So we went about drawing up a simple plan. We were lucky for two reasons:
1. Husband was able to do the work himself because he was doing contract work from home at the time and could make his own schedule. This saved money but also insured that we wouldn’t have a group of strangers in our home that we had to nag about a timeline.
2. We bought new appliances in 2006, which majorly cut back on our costs. (Our biggest expense was the countertops.)
By far the scariest moment of this renovation was cutting the hole for the sink in that gorgeous piece of butcher block.
We ended up making a total of 6 updates to the kitchen:
- Butcher block countertops (We get a lot of questions about these, and I’ll talk about caring for them later this week.)
- A new undermount, single bowl sink
- Painting the walls and bottom cabinets (inside and out)
- Adding a tile backsplash
- Shelves with a small countertop on the other side of the range
- Under-cabinet lighting
Really nice job, Hannah and James! Several improvements to make life easier and more enjoyable without gutting the whole thing and spending MAJOR dollars! The he look is so fitting with the history of the house.