Kitchen Re-do

For the past few months Kristian and I have been discussing and starting the planning process for redoing our very outdated and tiny kitchen. When we bought the house, one of the things I hated about it was the kitchen (and the master bath but that's a whole 'nother post). Fortunately the things we liked about the house (the view and the price) outweighed my hatred of the kitchen.

We knew we wanted to renovate the kitchen in the future however, kitchen renos aren't cheap and since we aren't trying to do the whole thing ourselves a la One House Love we didn't think we would be able to update it anytime soon. Well after receiving some unexpected funds after my father passed away we decided that it would be a good investment to go ahead and redo the kitchen with some of that money. Not only would it make us happier to have an updated kitchen but would add value to the house if/when we ever sell.

Construction hasn't started yet but we've paid our deposit, picked out the tile and ordered the cabinets. We still need to pick out the granite and decide on a paint color (something light and creamy most likely) but I suspect our contractor will get started in the next couple weeks.

Below are some pictures that I took after we moved in. The one good thing was that we had all new appliances (which we are going to trade in for stainless steel). Our biggest issue with the room is the lack of counter space and small cabinets that don't provide much storage.

Very early 90'stastic

We have two doorways. One doorway is to the left coming in from the entryway and this other doorway going into the dining room.

We actually love our pot rack and plan to keep that where it is.

We also have a nice large window and the plan is to build a bench underneath that you can not only sit on but will open up and where we can store lesser used big items (ex: crockpot).

Kristian found a photo online when he googled "townhouse kitchens" that we've been using as our inspiration photo. We are trying to make our kitchen look as much like this one as possible. This means that we will be closing up the second doorway leading into the dining room and just adding a window pass through. That way we can still see into the dining and living rooms but we'll get the extra counter space underneath. We will also be repositioning the location of the sink, oven and dishwasher so that it looks like the picture.

Hello 2012!

The tile that we picked out for the back splash and floor and is very similar though not exactly like the picture. Actually I like our tile better. We plan to pick our similar looking granite for the counters as well.

Below are the photos that our contractor sent us of what the kitchen is expected to look like with the cabinets we ordered and using our kitchen layout. We will probably go with a slightly lighter granite and wall color, more cream and less yellow.

We will also be adding a microwave over the stove so that we can get rid of our teeny stand alone microwave that we hate.

We responded to him with a few tweaks that we want to make but this will give the basic idea of what it should look like when it's finished. Also, it's hard to tell in the photos but the appliances will be stainless steel.

This shows the doorway closed up and the addition of the pass through.

We plan to change the small drawers to two large cabinets doors instead. We will also still have our pot rack hanging over these cabinets.

He didn't include the window or the bench that will go underneath the window but we plan to include that as well.

So what do you think? Any ideas for things we should change/add?