Kitchen DIY on a Budget

Brittany at Love Stitched is having a SHOW ME YOUR KITCHEN! day, so here it goes!

We bought out house in July of 2003. The former owners had lived her for around 32 years and while they had taken good care of it, it certainly needed lots of updating. But it had good bones and we knew we could work with it. Afterall, we had owned 2 houses prior to this, each of them for 2 years, and we had updated the heck out of those.

But... we didn't take my pregnancy - with twins - and our toddler into account.  Oh, and the bedrest (in the hospital till they arrived, not even at home) shortly after we moved in. So, to keep it short, we're still updating stuff in this house.

The kitchen. OH the kitchen. When we moved in, it was god awful. I should have taken photos. There was this wallpaper on the walls.

 

And the cabinets were a cream color w/ a country blue moulding in the center of them (not sure of the name for that). Nasty.  And the flooring was 80's vinyl.  We hired someone to tear the wallpaper off and found layers of paint and wallpaper under. How cool is this paper?

So what we did to make it liveable was to put in new, cheap vinyl flooring and paint the cabinets white and replace all the knobs. And paint the walls, of course.

 

 

We lived like this for a few years, but frankly, using the kitchen was miserable. I hated that kitchen. The counters were nasty textured that I felt were never clean. And when I'd open those drawers, sawdust would fall into the cabinets below.

So we took the leap - on a limited budget - and tore it all out. We made a decision not to do custom cabinetry or to tear out any walls or anything like that, because with the housing market how it was, we were sure that we'd not get it back. We tried to maximize our space, trying to add a cabinet/fridge in the cabinet/desk...anything we could think of, on that empty wall. But there's limited walk-thru space and we couldn't make it happen.  So we stuck with the current layout.  And it was HARD.  In order to get a full-sized dishwasher (because we didn't move the plumbing), we were limited in the fridge design/style and size (well, unless we didn't want the dishwasher to open).  And we could only get a single bowl sink b/c of the space/dishwasher.  But we made it work. While being frugal, we tried to stay true to the style of the home. We DIY, except for hiring out for someone to replace a pipe and for someone to do the finish carpentry and install the window.  Oh, and the floor. Oh the floor.

We started to DIY, but found that there were too many layers. Our current floor (different than the first vinyl we put in when we moved in), subfloor, the fug floral vinyl, subfloor, and then asbestos tile glued to the wood floor.  Oy vey!

We took a leap of faith that the floors would be salvegeable and hired a flooring company to remove and refinish them back the the original maple.  Look at that nasty glue!

 

Holla! It worked! The finished product!!!

{curtains yet to be made/hung}

 

The only pics I have hanging up :(

My littles, back in 2005

Photogs I took in NOLA 2 yrs ago

See that material?  That's going to be my awesome curtains I am going to make for both kitchen windows. Very soon. And I took the cushions off the bench b/c they were nasty dirty. I need to recover them, but first need to find a fabric that won't show dirt or pet hair! And we hate that window. HATE IT. It will be replaced in the next 12 mos.

That's an ikea chopping block thingey that we've made into a breakfast bar since we don't have an eat-in kitchen. Can't put a table back there by the window b/c to the left, there's 2 doorways - 1 for upstairs, 1 for the back door/basement.

We're not done. And I am not talking about the curtains and window, either.  We got cheap countertops and I hate them.  I mean, they're much better than what we had, but a year or so from now, we'll get something better with an undermount sink (I think that's what I hate most...that I dont have that).  Because it looks like we're here to stay for awhile.