Kitchen Renovation: The Plan

The first major renovation my brother talked us into is the kitchen. We don't love our kitchen but we don't hate it either. It's totally the we-can-live-with-this-for-a-few-years kitchen. After a couple of months of "we can do this...we can do that...and it'll be less expensive than you think...." from my brother, Phu, we were convinced. We've watched enough DIY and HGTV to know that the kitchen is where you can add major value to your home. So we figured, what the heck. Let's do it. Here's a quick run down of the current situation.

The pros:
- lots of storage space
- stainless steal appliances
- a huge island that adds 20 square feet of much needed counter space

The cons:
- white laminate counters. EVERYTHING stains them! It doesn't matter if I wipe it up a nano second after it hits the counters. Annoys the crap out of me.
- lots of wasted storage space in the bottom cabinets/island because of the shelves and the depth. It's not an uncommon sight at our house to see the lower half of my body hanging out of the island as I try to grab a pot.
- traditional wood paneling all over the kitchen walls. It's just not our style so we want it gone.


The Plan

1. To keep costs down, we're keeping the layout of the kitchen and plan on re-using the cabinet boxes.
2. Re-face the cabinets
3. Build new drawers with new faces (current drawers are too shallow and don't stay closed)
4. Build pull-out drawers for pots for easy access
5. New soft close drawer slides and door hinges
6. Replace kitchen hardware
7. Replace back splash
8. Build concrete counter tops
9. Build pull-out trash can and recycling bin
10. Scoot stove over to close up awkward gap and build pull-out spice rack next to stove with another upper cabinet above it
11. Remove traditional paneling/trim from walls (and cross our fingers that there is sheet rock behind there that we can just patch up and re-paint)

Man, seems like a lot of work when I actually write it all out. This renovation is going to be slow going since we're just working on things after work and on the weekends. The goal is to be done with it by the end of August so that gives us about 3 months.

And our reward for completing our kitchen renovation is.....a puppy! Alright, really it's a reward for me. I've been telling the hubs I want a puppy for about 3 months now. He's probably annoyed with me interrupting him mid-conversation with "I want a puppy" at random times. He won't let me get one until after the kitchen is done...something about not wanting to worry about having a puppy around all the construction and not having enough time for it while we're trying to renovate.....blah blah blah, ya know, all that logical stuff.

Posts are kind of boring without pictures, huh? I'll post up some "before" pics in the next one. I'm new at all this blogging stuff so give me a break.