The Kitchen Project
The Kitchen was our first big house project after we moved in. I had visions of a big open concept kitchen but knew we couldn’t afford to knock down walls and renovate everything right away. We needed to update the space, but in a practical way. We set a budget of $4,000, which we were able to stretch a long way.
We were lucky to have the original wood floors under the linoleum tile in the kitchen (which we refinished) and reusing the original cabinets saved us thousands of dollars. Our cabinets were in good shape but definitely had their imperfections. Painting them provided an instant update, and using a darker color was more dramatic and hid the flaws.
When we tried to install new lighting, we ran into a roadblock. Our cement cased bathroom pipes above the kitchen got in the way of the few perfectly centered lights I had in mind. We decided instead to use a rectangular crystal chandelier to extend the light as far as we could across the kitchen and add a bit of glam. We ended up with this mix of modern and rustic styles that I feel I may not have ever had the guts to try if I was putting in a brand new kitchen.
I never thought I’d be so excited about hinges, but hinges were my life for about six months. I spent a crazy amount of time hunting for European style concealed hinges that could retrofit to our cabinets. Our old cabinets had decorative hinges on the outside of the cabinet doors, which made for a very dated look. I tried buying cheap decorative hinges and painting them, but hated it. The only company I found that sells the type of concealed hinges I needed was Rockler Woodworking and Hardware. Though very expensive relative to our budget, they were worth it! It took my husband a full day and an immeasurable amount of patience to install these, but they allowed me to get what I really wanted when it came to knobs and pulls without worrying about matching hardware.
We needed to buy a new stove, but couldn’t change the location without reconfiguring the kitchen. The space for the stove is set back between two walls, with gaps on either side of the stove. To make this space as functional as possible, my husband created cabinets that pull out on tracks, which we now use for our spices and utensils. The problem from a design standpoint was how to make these added pieces flow with the rest of the kitchen. They would never match the old cabinets perfectly, so we chose instead to make them complimentary.
We used Stikwood’s reclaimed weathered wood planks to create the doors for these cabinets. After feeling good about how these came out, we decided to close up an extra doorway in our kitchen to add another set of cabinets that we refaced with the Stikwood. The area we had to work with was a bit narrower than other parts of the kitchen, so we used upper cabinets as lowers, which are not quite as deep. The cabinets were free from a local salvaged building materials store, Community Forklift and we picked up a “remnant” piece of marble (an unused scrap from a previous job), after learning that if you don’t need a lot you can get a high-end piece of stone for a few hundred bucks. This made it look almost like a piece of furniture we added to the kitchen, rather than an additional set of cabinets.
This project added value to our home and helped kick off our love of DIY projects. Since finishing the kitchen, we’ve been moving from one room to the next, striving to make each project perfect (for us), one at a time.