Good Bye Kitchen

This is how everyone starts off life in their new home right? By demoing the “old” kitchen down to the studs?

Here’s a look at the “BEFORE”

Was the existing kitchen in this house terrible?

No. The owner had actually just thrown a bunch of money at it in an attempt to get a better offer on the house. (And lots of people we know actually loved it when we showed them pictures of the house before we bought it.)

Was it original to the house, remotely our style or even just well done workmanship?

No. No. And very no. Even though it looks *ok* from the pics, there were A LOT of things that were just *not quite right* about it. Clearly the previous owners tried to do a quick cosmetic update without fixing any of the underlying issues.

The biggest problem that desperately needed to be addressed was the *completely unlevel* floors. Joe said it felt like walking downhill to go from one side of the room to the other.

This caused *all* the cabinets to not sit level or square on the floor, which meant the countertops then had to be shimmed up to level *a lot* in places. In the pic below you can sort of see the weird gap between the countertop and the lower cabinets where they used wood shims to try and raise the countertop up to be level. (It’s not the best pic I know, but I think you can sort of see what I’m talking about). You can also see how the corner cabinets didn’t really line up with the other cabinets.

While the cabinet boxes themselves were *ok* and in decent condition, we didn’t feel like they were sized quite right for this space.

The sink wasn’t properly centered under the window. (WHY!? If you’re going to get this close to center, you should have just centered the sink! I know this may not have bothered a lot of people but this along was enough of a reason for me to want to remove this kitchen and start over.)

The cabinets jutted out into the dining nook *just a tad too far*, making the area left for a table unusable by anything bigger than a two person bistro table. (And this is the only dining area in our whole house so…..)

There was also no pantry, and no place to store a trash can where it wound’t be the first thing you see when you enter the kitchen.

In the end, we decided it was just going to be best to carefully remove everything and start from scratch.

Luckily I was able to sell EVERYTHING we removed (except the tile, RIP 90s tastic beige tile) on FB Marketplace! So nothing was wasted and we were able to make some money towards cutting down our renovation costs!