The Center Attraction Part I

I'm going to throw you all for a loop today. I've decided to take a short hiatus from wedding planning, mostly because the stuff I'm down to are not something I'm inspired about. Today I want to write you about our kitchen. The kitchen is known for being the center ground for entertaining. Well in order for us to entertain we'd need a serious remodel. Someday that may happen, but in the meantime we needed help in other areas. Now our kitchen serves also as a hallway, being that both bedroom doors and the bathroom door are in the kitchen, so blocking the traffic flow doesn't make any sense, aesthetically or functionally.

The day we moved into our home our kitchen looked like this (see picture to the right). In fact this picture is from the realtor website (which is why its so small and the lack of appliances, we were too busy moving to take pictures on day one). I don't know how much you can tell from this picture, but storage in this kitchen was virtually non-existent, not to mention dark wood color which seemed to age it...For bottom cabinetry it had three-twelve inch drawers, five 15-18" drawers, three twelve inch cupboards, and three 15-18" cupboards. The upper cabinets consisted of two 12" deep, 24" wide cupboards (each had two doors hence why you see (kinda) four doors). There is also a canned good storage in the back of the kitchen by the back door.

Now you can't really tell from this picture but the floor is sheet vinyl (meaning that its all one piece no tile replacement possible, at least not without some real handiwork) and the walls are a taupe-brownish color. They were looking for a neutral non-white color to paint the rooms, and paint they did.... every room but the bathroom was this color. Yish! Being an art kid, and married to one for that matter, taupe/brown is just not an option. Its dull and boring. If you'll look by the doorway into the kitchen, you'll see that 12" by 15"(give or take) little alcove... yep, that's the chimney, now while it may seem small it caused some problems when it came to table placement.

The ceiling, again kind of hard to see was the typical school drop-ceiling. If your school didn't have drop ceiling and had those 12"x12" tiles that had holes in them (like some classrooms at my school), guess what! Those were under the drop ceiling. So needless to say we were losing a good foot of head room, and our kitchen lighting consisted of two giant fluorescent lights that are built into the drop-ceiling grid.

Now, with a kitchen that obviously needed so much work (and believe me its not the only thing we've put work into here) why buy this house? Well, we are DIY'ers and half the fun of DIY is making it your own.

So y'all are just dying to know, where'd we take it? What does it look like now... Well tune in for the next edition of Making Our Own Dream Home...