The Big Reveal – Kitchen Remodel & Other Things

Finally! After several months of hearing about it, living through it, and wishing and praying for a happy outcome, it’s finally time to let y’all in on the secret that is Our Really Cool Kitchen.

The professionals of Source1 Project Solutions worked wonders to come up with this design and keep us on schedule. I’m not sure how this is supposed to work (and don’t want to live through a kitchen remodel again for a long, long time!), but I loved their process and communication. If you are looking to do any home project, I would highly recommend Jon and Jason. (I’m sure Toby is great, too, but I never worked with him.)

Here we go!

Removing the wall between the dining room and the kitchen made all the difference in the world. What was two small spaces became something huge! We moved the kitchen about three feet into the dining room space and still feel like there is plenty of room for our extra-wide table.

(Fun side note – our next door neighbor, with the same floor plan as us, said that they had five different contractors give proposals for their kitchen remodel a few years ago and no one suggested removing the wall. Oops.)

Since we lost the cabinets over the stove, Randy had the idea to add in this china cabinet. We were trying to keep the kitchen as one space and the dining room as another and this piece is what ties the two together.

The floors are really cool – they look like suede. Only problem is they are really hard for long bouts of cooking. I’ve got to get some rugs. If only I could figure out accent colors…

This is my issue… The back splash is beautiful. Filled with gorgeous glass tile of different colors and textures, it catches the under cabinet lights perfectly, but the color of the tiles changes depending on what time of day it is. Sometimes they are more brown, sometimes red, sometimes we even get a mermaid green or lavender purple.

How would you decorate with this?

More things I love about this room:

So! Much! Counterspace!

A perfectly placed garbage can that can remain out of the way until I need it.

Silly feature that has already proven useful – the pass-through window to the patio…

I’m struggling with a couple things, namely that we have so much much kitchen stuff (ours + a lot of mom’s) and I can’t figure out the perfect placement for everything. It’s great to have cabinets up to the ceiling, but when you are a midget, it makes those top shelves almost unusable. There is a corner cabinet next to the stove where I’ll probably put the china. It’s a space that’s really hard to get into.

Also, Randy talked me into drawers vs. cabinets for the pots and pans. I’m sure this is going to be great once I’m used to it, but eh… Not yet. Do you have a set-up like this? If so, how do you organize?

We spent the most time and energy on two spaces that aren’t even cooking related – Noah’s command center and my cookbook shelves. Ladies and gents… these could tie as my most favorite parts of the kitchen…

We didn’t do anything to the floor in the dining room and are using the table from our old house, which is black with antiqued red paint underneath. The light (and all the other lights) came from BBC Lighting, which could be my new favorite store in Milwaukee.

I mean…are there even words for how slick this is?! I am staring at pictures of my kitchen like I used to stare at Bop! magazine pics of Leonardo DiCaprio. Sigh…So what do you think? As you can tell, I’m pretty stoked to have such a fun place to play in and make treats for you all. And if you’ve made it this far, you deserve a treat right now…

Yep… Randy and I can’t seem to be without 14 big projects going at one time, so we’re excited to add this one to the list. We’ve heard the heartbeat a couple of times. So far, I’ve felt great, though I’ve got to tell you – having house-fulls of strangers banging around on every available wall, pipe, and electrical outlet has been a bit much when I just wanted to nap. (Related – tile glue smells like rotten fish when you’re pregnant… Those were a fun few days…)

Just a few things going on with us. 🙂 What’s new with you?