Kitchen: Before and After
28. Dec, 2009 
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One of us whipper-outers is about to embark on mild kitchen rehab, and I thought this week I’d share some pics of the before and after of The Kitchen Reno That Never Ended. I didn’t do the work myself- we had a contractor who didn’t like to wear underwear. Please do not ask me how I know that. I just do.
About a year and a half ago, January through August 2008, while we had a newborn and a 2 year old, we renovated our kitchen. Wow, was that ever a good idea. The newborn Baba O’Riley was easy, but poor Freebird had a microwavable menu that was just… sad.
Here’s a picture of the old kitchen. It was about 12′ wide by 12′ wide. And impossible.
I do not know why there was a mirror over the cooktop in the corner. Really. No clue. I didn’t want to look at my own boobs while cooking, I do know that.
One of the countertops was barely 18″ deep – barely enough to hold the breadmaker. Note: the microwave? 8′ in the air. WHAT THE DICKENS were people THINKING?! We will not discuss the number of times I nearly spilled hot soup on my own head. Explain THAT at the ER, shall we?
This was the second time in my life I’d renovated a kitchen. Before we had children, Hubby and I lived in Jersey City, NJ, and we gutted and renovated that kitchen, too. It was a lot easier when it was just the two of us, and we did that kitchen on a seriously tiny budget.
The contractor was all, “Oh, and we’ll do custom tile floors” and we were all, “The hell we will. We’d never get that money back in resale.” I remember clearly when the Formica was put in on the counters, and the smell of the hot clue. Rwor. Sexxy.
So this time, we wanted to do our kitchen on a budget, but we didn’t want to use Formica, either. We saved up for a hellalong time and looked at all sorts of financing options before we decided that we had to (a) completely remove the old kitchen because there wasn’t a configuration that could possibly improve it, because it sucked, and (b) we had to make sure we did it exactly the way we wanted because we’d be living with it for a long, long time. This was, unlike Jersey City, a renovation without half an eye on selling the property soon.
This is the new kitchen:
That corner is where the mirrored cooktop used to be. We added on to the house and that single-door cabinet next to the window marks where the old kitchen and the back wall of the house stood.
I’m standing in the addition taking this picture. The area inside the counter top is the space where the old kitchen was. The cat to the right of the drawers is Gracie. She never misses a photo op. There are drawers beneath the cooktop for pots and pans, and lazy susans in each corner. The backsplash is grey subway tile (very budget-friendly) and the backsplash above the cooktop is blue glass tile (not budget friendly). I wanted to do the entire backsplash in the blue glass but oh, my stars and garters. There was no way. Holy smokin’ expensive. There were other options during the design phase, including this trend where you put a tile mosaic of a rooster or a giant scary peen-like cornucopia above the cooktop, but I didn’t want any farm animals looking at me when I cooked. So we did a small section of the blue glass and the rest in slate grey subway tile.
The cabinet to the left of the wall oven (beneath that, partially hidden, is the microwave, at kid-level) is the pantry. The shelves roll out – this is simply freaking majestic. Prior to that our nonperishable foods were in a drafty, horrible closet by the back door that made everything in there extremely perishable.
The addition is very popular, as we added a lot of windows, and places for the cats to watch Birdie TV.
You’ll notice that the windows are very, very popular (That’s Oliver, Grace’s brother).
The working space of the new kitchen is about the same size of the old kitchen, except that it’s laid out about 1,000,000 times better.
We did a number of things I really liked when we finally did the whole renovation, including an addition to the house itself that added a dining area and a half bath, and the closet in which I store sweet potatoes. The counter tops are Caesarstone, which is a quartz composite, and I spent a LOT of time on researching countertop options on budgetary, environmental, and practical levels, and must have felt up a few hundred different samples.
We were religious followers of The Church of Consumer Reports for most of the appliance purchases, except that I really wanted a five burner gas cooktop with knobs located such that I didn’t light my arm hair on fire to reach the back ones, and CR didn’t rate those specifically. The new kitchen is such an impossible improvement over the old one, I can’t even tell you.
But let’s cut to the good part, right? Here, let me show you the most expensive thing in the kitchen. Ready?
You sure?
Here it is!
This pillar is named “Overbudget.” Sexy pillar isn’t it?
When the contractor removed the appliances from the old kitchen, he found a floor that was so sagging, and so bowed toward the basement, he was afraid to step on it. Seriously. Adolescents could have skateboarded in there for hours. Such are the joys of renovating an 80 year old house – ask me about knob and tube wiring! We had plenty of that, too, but we knew it was in there – ergo that portion was in the budget. The hella-warped floor? No idea.
So, we had to get a set of support pillars. They were Ex. Pen. Sive. For the amount of money those pillars cost, they should be beautiful, right? NO. They’re kind of plain. But I love them. Because right above Overbudget, and his brother Screw That Estimate are the fridge, the oven, and some cabinets, and they’re still on the first floor where they were installed over a year ago. THANK GOD.
So that’s my kitchen. Stay tuned for cooking from inside the kitchen. It’s where I hang out most of the time. The cats, too.
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Oh snap. Your kitchen is gorgeous, I’m dying of jealousy.
As it turns out, we’ve decided (as of just this weekend) not to gut the counters. Josh wants to sell the house this year and he doesn’t think we’d get the money out of the time and effort it would take to redo them. Though we do have all of the tiles for the counters. He thinks it would be too much for a house we want to sell. So, instead, we’re going to drop in a new sink and a new garbage disposal (ours died on Xmas Day) and call it good. I hate our sink with a passion, so that’s his nod to me having to live with this kitchen until we sell.
Faaaancy! I love the new kitchen, particularly the groovy blue hanging lights. Very french bistro-ish, I think. Also, love the windows for birdy-TV. Ours is the bay window in the dining room.
One question, in the old kitchen, is the hatch thingy below the old stove a warming oven? I keep hearing about those and wondered if anyone had one. I’m somewhat entranced by them.
About the mirror in back of the stove, were the people who lived in the house before you into feng shui?
Cause putting a mirror behind the burners is a feng shui thing. The idea behind it is to attract abundance. The mirror reflects the four burners to create the illusion of many more, there by adding more fortune.
Also, it looks like to cook on your stove, you’d have to stand with your back to the door. That’s bad feng shui. Having your back to an opening in any room leaves you a bit defenseless and open to negative energy coming at you.
I don’t know that any of this stuff is true, but it’s probably an explanation for the mirror.
Oh and your new kitchen is gorgeous!
Jealous!
I have a galley kitchen with cabinets you can barely fit a dinner plate into, a pantry the size of a freezer in a side-by-side, and bench space? foogettaboutdit!
Kati, coming from NZ this whole lack of warming drawers is boggling. The ovens here in the US are HUGE! (I realised after the first thanksgiving as to why – to fit a freaking huge assed turkey in) but no warming drawers. The drawer in the bottom of my oven is stone cold! How am I supposed to keep all the parts of a dinner warm? (and no I’m not talking those types of drawers that are more like a mini oven, these are just a drawer that is warm)
We bought our 75 year old house this summer and renovated the kitchen. Found out the floor where the washer sat was rotted out. The beam and support had to be jacked back up and rebuilt.
We had a beer budget for my champagne taste.
I wanted refinished floors, new counter tops, new cabinets, shiny black appliances and a new design.
Because of that leak, I got a new tile floor to prevent disaster from future leaks, granite counter tops (cheap here in the granite capital of the US) and plain white appliances.
I love your new kitchen.
I want it for my own.
Hi Kati! That’s not a warming drawer; that’s the broiler, which was about 5″ tall. Utterly useless. I haven’t had any need for a warming drawer for anything, though, because I can keep most things warm with foil when needed, or a 150F oven.
@Leah: I don’t know if they were into feng shui, but they were very, very tall. All the shelves and cabinets were up up up in the air – like the microwave – and the first thing we had to buy was a step stool!
Thanks for the compliments to the kitchen. I do love it, even though it took forever and more to complete. It’s easily my favorite room. And it smells good, too.
I live in an apartment. The kitchen is 9′ by 7′ (wall to wall) so subtract room for freezer, refrigerator, stove, dishwasher, and cabinets. Approximate standing room is 4′ by 4′.
And in this apartment are four adults, two children, two cats and one dog. I suspect my entire apartment would fit in your kitchen. So please, I earnestly encourage you to enjoy every single minute you spend in your kitchen. If I had a kitchen that big, I would probably install a day bed and sleep there, too.