Kitchen Reveal

I have to come clean. We finished the kitchen over a month ago. But between replacing the roof and starting on the next major project I forgot to post pictures of the kitchen. All in all, it took about five months from demo to completion. To be fair, if we were remodeling only the kitchen we would have been finished long ago. But because of permitting and inspection hassles we ended up doing the kitchen, dining, living and laundry rooms all at the same time. On top of that we had to do all the framing, electrical and plumbing work for the master suite as well. But all the work and expense have paid off with our newly finished kitchen.

Just so the change is more dramatic, here are the photos from the day we moved in.

Dining room with the kitchen on the left and separated by a pocket door.
New view of dining room
The wall separating the kitchen and dining room made getting consistent photo angles difficult. This one was shot looking from the dining room looking into the kitchen (laundry room visible to the right).

 The new layout eliminated the two L-shaped counters and allows a straight path through the kitchen into the laundry room and on to the master suite.
Old view from laundry room toward dining room

Although the kitchen is not any larger it feels much more open now that the wall is gone. Suddenly this 10' x 10' space seems perfectly adequate. Even though very little cooking goes on, the addition of the dining bar/counter has made the kitchen the hub of our house.
Wall of appliances with tiled backsplash.

Granite counter and tile backsplash
After stripping the room to the studs and starting from scratch our total cost came to $8000 for the kitchen and dining room. All the appliances were purchased as scratch and dent models from Lowes for 44 cents on the dollar. The cabinets are plywood and maple construction (no MDF) and were ordered ready to assemble from a manufacturer in Kansas City that we have used once before. Assembling them ourselves added a few extra hours, but saved us $6000 over retail. The counters are granite tile instead of granite slab, saving another $3500. As always the work is all our own or we never would have been able to afford a new kitchen.

In the next few days I'll be posting pictures of the finished living room and then we'll start sharing our newest project, the master suite.