Kitchen and Dining Room

Up next to show you is the kitchen. As you'll see in the before pictures, the kitchen isn't bad at all! Very nice appliances, granite countertops, tons of cabinets. I LOVE the french door refrigerator. We are so glad we didn't have to spend money replacing countertops or appliances. The biggest change that we made in the kitchen is that we took out the wall separating the kitchen from the dining room, and then as I showed in the living room post, we widened the opening from the dining room to the living room. We also continued the wood flooring from the living room into the kitchen and dining. These changes made this part of the house feel SO much bigger and open. The previous owner was using the dining room as an office, or at least had it staged that way.  

BEFORE

DURING

We started by scraping the popcorn in these rooms, then took out the wall separating the kitchen from the dining room. We removed the carpet from the dining room and the cork flooring from the kitchen. Jesse and his Dad widened the opening from the dining room to the living room. Jesse had to re-wire some lights in this room and patch the ceiling and walls where the separating wall came down. Dad and I painted these rooms the same gray as the living room and painted the molding the same white. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our first night in the house, the power went out in town -- just as I finished cooking dinner. My parents had been keeping our boys while we finished up the house and they had just brought them home. Jesse's parents were there helping us get everything finished. We all had dinner around our table by candlelight. It was a really sweet evening.

Plans for this room: As you can tell from some of these pictures, we are testing out paint colors for the cabinets. We are gearing up to say goodbye to the honey oak cabinets. PLEASE ignore that terrible green color. It is NOT a consideration. Really all of them can be ignored. We are trying to decide if we want to do a gray on the lower cabinets and white on the uppers or just all white on both upper and lowers.  We will be taking down the florescent lights and installing recessed lights from the kitchen into the dining room. We are also planning on putting built in bookshelves on the ends of the cabinets where the wall once was to finish off that part of the cabinet and countertop. Also on the shopping list: a new rug.