Sitting on the couch one evening, my husband says to me, “Have you ever thought of remodeling the kitchen ourselves? It took me a minute, ok a few minutes, to realize he was serious, and then respond with “Have you lost your mind?” To be fair, he hadn’t come up with the idea completely out of the blue. We’d spent a couple of years dreaming about updating our tired kitchen space.
Initially, when we first started talking about renovating our kitchen, I thought an easy way to update and erase the orange vibe I was getting from this well-used area of our home was to simply paint the kitchen cabinets! Yay! Great idea! Bursting my bubble, my husband pointed out that the counter tops would need to be replaced as well. Then, it made sense to change the backsplash and if we were changing the backsplash, what if we removed the upper cabinets as well and did open shelving? YES, we thought….what a wonderful design we had come up with! And then the estimates started coming in from the contractors. WOW!
Thinking my kitchen dreams were dashed I resigned myself to the fact that I would just have to live with my orange kitchen a little while longer. That is, until, after a simple question “have you ever thought..?” and a tad bit of convincing, we decided to move full steam ahead and do it ourselves!
Buh Bye Upper cabinets! If I heard it once, I heard a million times, “Are you sure you want to remove your cabinets?!” and “What will you do with all of your stuff?” Believe me, we gave it careful thought and much consideration and I am soooo happy we ditched them. As for the STUFF? I didn’t need it! Christmas dishes I use once a year? I put them in the attic. Fifty two million coffee cups (ok, I am exaggerating a little BUT let’s just say it was enough that I will NEVER give someone a coffee cup for gift- EVER!) I donated them to a good cause! Turns out a lot of the stuff were things that I hadn’t touched in the 10+ years we’d called this place home! It felt so good to purge!
More demo! This was one of my favorite parts- the kiddos got involved and it turns out hammering your wall to bits is quite cathartic!
This very large piece of granite was super heavy. My husband, me, and two other guys removed this big hunk of rock without creating a large hole in the floor- Whew! We were so relieved and I felt like Wonder Woman!
A little research led us to the cabinet maker for our cabinets so we ordered a new one to replace the desk that was in the kitchen. This has given us one large even counter space!
Modifying our existing cabinet and installing a farmhouse sink with a short apron front was our initial plan, but since we were already ordering a new cabinet to replace the desk, my husband had the idea to order a new cabinet for the sink as well so we could have a full size sink. Yippee! We are so glad we did- when we removed the old sink cabinet, it almost fell apart! A few years ago, we had a water leak from the dishwasher and the water had caused more damage than we thought. Had we installed the 150lb sink it would have been bad news!
Ta da! We found an amazing tool to support the farmhouse sink. It worked so well and the customer support was beyond amazing! I highly recommend Pete’s Sink Mount for your farmhouse sink install!
Visiting showroom after showroom trying to pick out quartz was super fun! Well, it was for my husband anyway. Not so much for an extremely indecisive person like myself. Who knew that there are 5 gazillion options and that I’m a gal that has champagne taste on a beer budget! Most of the show rooms have small sample sizes that don’t show the true look of the quartz. We ended up finding a place that was a showroom and fabricator all in one. Our salesperson was knowledgeable and patient. He walked us through a yard full of quartz and granite slabs and even showed us where the fabrication would take place. Through this process I learned I am a highly visual person, meaning I need to see it to believe it. East Coast Granite was superb from beginning to end, they helped me see it, believe it, and LOVE it!
While we waited for the quartz to be templated and installed, I began the first phase of cabinet painting (6 phases in all) A whole other post needs to be dedicated to that large but extremely gratifying process. Seriously ya’ll, if I can paint my cabinets, anyone can paint their cabinets and you can save a boatload of money. We received a quote for $4500 and we spent under $500- including the new knobs! Woohoo!
Simultaneously, as I was painting my little heart out, my husband repaired drywall, moved cabinets (did I mention we moved the entire back row of cabinets down so that the stove top would be centered?!) and installed the brackets for our floating butcher block shelves. He did an amazing job and has the patience of a saint- seriously, I would have given up a hundred times over, but not him. Thank goodness! I used Fusion’s food grade hemp oil on the shelves and they are perfect! Loved LOVED working with this stuff and I went on a mission to see what else I could put hemp oil on- more on that later!
Another change from the master plan was adding an extension with crown molding to our cabinets. Funny story and another “have you ever thought moment” was my husband asking me if I liked the space above the cabinets- “Nope, not at all” was my reply! It always got SO dusty. (A little tip for you: if you do have space above your cabinets, line them with wax paper. When you want to remove the grime and dust from above your cabinets, all you have to do is toss the wax paper and place a new piece- easy peasy!) This turned into quite a large project in the middle of quite a large project but we are so happy that we went this route.
Doing everything ourselves, with the exception of the quartz countertops, was going very well. We could change things up as we went, we were learning a ton, and we could make everything just how we wanted it! Then, after completing the backsplash on the refrigerator wall we worried that doing the big wall- counter top to ceiling was a little over our heads- haha! So, we hired someone and I’ll just be nice and say it did NOT go well.
With the tile and grout complete all we had to do was wait for our custom vent hood to be finished and delivered. And wait we did! Man, I am not good at being patient. Well, it finally came and after much planning…so much planning and WAITING! Me: “Can we hurry it up already?” My husband: “Sweetie, we are cutting a hole in the side of our house- it has to be perfect” Me (about 10 minutes later): “Are we ready to cut the hole in the side of the house now?” I’m really suprised we didn’t fight more during this whole process!
Our kitchen renovation journey began on March 15. A few mishaps and a pandemic later, our DIY kitchen reno was finally complete on September 12! Woohoo! We couldn’t be happier with the final result and all that we learned during the process- I’m still working on the whole patience thing 😉
See my pantry door- It might be one of my favorite things we did! We also revamped the pantry and I love it so much, I think it deserves it’s own post!
Amazing things we used and loved:
Fusion Mineral Paint https://fusionmineralpaint.com/
Alaska Bianca Quartz http://eastcoastgranitecharlotte.com/
Farmhouse sink mount https://sinkmount.com/?utm_content=ETAv1&utm_term=sink%20mount
Ever Thought 