Kitchen Reveal: But First, The Before

It has been well over a year since I first posted about our kitchen, and our plans to renovate it, mostly by ourselves. What can I say? We embrace DIY.

We started demo in February 2012, redid the drywall in February and March, primed and painted the cabinets in March through May, and got all the cabinets (and doors) back up in May 2012. Then we took a little break while we actually lived our lives for a few months, then ripped up the floors and had them redone in August 2012.

At first, I updated on our progress relatively regularly, but once we took that break between May and August, I just never got back on board. I always meant to post about our floor installation, but the truth is that it was such a nightmare, that I couldn’t even bring myself to blog about it. Let’s put it this way: Our original contractor started putting the floor down, and it just wasn’t right. We tried to talk it through with him, but he stood by his work, and we stood by the fact that it was sub-par. He said we were at an impasse and ended up walking off of the job. Thankfully, we hadn’t paid him a penny. My cousin’s husband thankfully came to our rescue to get the job done, and then Michael’s grandfather passed away, we had Nora’s birthday, I had a miscarriage, and then we were several weeks removed from it all and I couldn’t talk myself into reliving the whole situation for the sake of a blog post because it sucked so badly.

Things were pretty stagnant again in September-November, but all we really had to do were the finishing touches. After Thanksgiving, I convinced my brother to come give us a hand with all of the cabinet molding. We had to do two different types of “crown”—one to cover the gap between the cabinets and the soffit, and we chose to do some traditional crown between the soffits and ceiling to make it look more finished and “built in.” That was done in an afternoon, but then required several evenings of finishing work—caulking, wood-filling, sanding, and two coats of paint. But a few weeks before Christmas? It was finally done.

Anyway, three months later, I finally got around to taking some official “after” photos of the space. And I really, really want to show it to you, even though if you’ve been reading here for a while you’ve seen lots of unofficial peeks at what it looks like from other photos I’ve shared.

But before I hit you with the “after” photos, it seems only appropriate to remind you first of what it looked like before. It’s been so long, I think it’s necessary. Truthfully, I had to remind myself of what it looked like, too. Brace yourselves. It was ugly.

Here we go… First, the pics of what it looked like right when we moved in (August 2011):

Wallpaper, z-brick, parquet. It was a mess. If you’re interested in some explanation about what you see in these photos, I talk more in this post about the state of the kitchen and the work we did shortly after we moved in—but it wasn’t much.

And here are photos I took right before we started demo in February 2012. They were all taken at night, so excuse the exceptionally bad lighting. But it really was THAT dark and gross:

Tomorrow, I’ll be back to share the afters. I promise. :)