So, to back up…We got back the plans from IKEA for our kitchen remodel and after asking for a few tweaks, we are ready to proceed with buying the supplies. Step one was to make room in our garage for the enormous quantity of boxes that would be living there until my contractor could start the laborious process of unpacking, sorting, and building the cabinets. As I’m sure you’re aware, IKEA is cheap and part of that is because YOU (or my contractor) have to put together the cabinets. It’s a huge pain in the ass but it’s worth it if you want an affordable kitchen.
My contractor spent a full 2 days putting together the cabinets. It was a lot more time-consuming than he thought it would be and his wife came by to pitch in to get the job done faster. #TeamWork!
My job was to get everything out of the cabinets and move all of our kitchen stuff to other parts of the house. Strangely enough this part was pretty exciting because it meant that the kitchen was finally going to be demolished soon. I didn’t realize how much I hated this kitchen until I saw the empty cabinets and could picture the ugliness being eviscerated with a sledgehammer. I made a note to myself to not wait so long to change something I hate living with.
Most of the items went into the dining room but that was after I AGAIN purged stuff I didn’t use. The new kitchen is going to have less cabinet space than my last kitchen so repeated purging was necessary.
Then came the demolition!
You can tell from the above photo that were was some ’80s vinyl in the kitchen with the ’90s vinyl sitting on top. I really hope that I won’t look back in 20 years and think what the hell was I thinking picking out that floor/cabinet/countertop because that’s exactly what I thought when I saw that vinyl floor.
Here’s a close up of the ’80s and ’90s.
No ’80s kitchen is complete without small-scale flower type wallpaper…
So, back to 2018, two major changes in the kitchen is the removal of part of a wall leading into the foyer and the removal of a closet near the garage to create more openness.
Foyer Before
This is how much room there was to enter the kitchen from the foyer:
It was a tight squeeze, but now the foyer looks so much more open.
Foyer During Renovation
There is now great flow and light coming from the kitchen into the foyer and I love it! I have to keep the kitchen super tidy since you can see it when you walk through the front door but not having to wind my way into the kitchen by turning right, then straight, then another hard left is worth it.
The other major flow change came from getting rid of a closet near the garage.
Closet (and choke point and SOFIA) before demolition
The above photo show how much room we had to get into the house from the garage before tearing out the closet. We have 4 dogs and they get excited when we come home. Opening the garage door and being crammed into that small space with all the dogs was torturous! We’d always yell, “Back dogs, back!” every time we walked in. It got old.
Now though, there’s so much more room and when the dogs greet us at the door, it’s not a stampede with no escape.
Closet after demolition
We’re actually a lot further along than the above photos show but rather than make this a SUPER long post, I’ll share those photos in another post.
