So big news – we’re redoing our kitchen!

Our kitchen is fine. Absolutely fine. But that’s just it – it is just…well, “fine”. It is filled with a lot of little things that annoy me and all add up to a loss of functionality. You can’t open the dishwasher door while you are standing at the sink, unless you’re REALLY skinny. Like, basically flat. Flatter than flat. There’s no pantry. The cabinets smell like 35 years of cooking. The saloon shape detailing on the doors drives me nuts. The drawers either don’t have tracks or the tracks have been glued together after having been broken over the years. In order to turn on all the lights in the kitchen, you have to walk to three different corners of the room. All of these things are silly, small things that we could have lived with, but renovating the kitchen just makes sense because our home has so much potential and is in a beautiful neighborhood. Renovating the kitchen will improve the value of the home and make it more enjoyable to use, and since I cook at least once a day, I use the kitchen a whole heck of a lot.

Our current kitchen:

Now on to the fun stuff: the plans.

We explored a variety of options in terms of who we would use to source new kitchen cabinets. We considered building them ourselves, but with a one year old and no shop space it didn’t exactly seem practical. I could see myself building my own cabinets someday in the future, but now didn’t seem like the best time to try to take on a project of that scale all alone. I had heard about companies that offer RTA cabinets, which is basically lies somewhere in between building them yourself and buying them pre-made. RTA stands for “ready to assemble”, so the pieces are all cut for you and you assemble them into cabinet boxes. It is still quite the time commitment, and between that and the fact that it allowed for surprisingly little creativity and customization, both of which we needed to make this kitchen work better, we felt that saving a little bit of money wasn’t worth the end result or the work involved.

We then reached out to Home Depot and Lowe’s to get estimates for pre-fab cabinets. We’ve bought and installed quite a few baseline prefab kitchen cabinets from Lowe’s in all our rental rehabs, but we knew we wanted to go with something a bit nicer for this house since it is in a nicer market. We weren’t thrilled with the lack of selection for the size of cabinets we needed, however, and the cost was a bit much to swallow for what we’d get. We ended up deciding to reach out to a local custom cabinetry shop that we had heard good things about. The craziest part? They were cheaper than the big box stores and offered CUSTOM cabinets built for our space and needs. They’re still prefab in the sense that they assemble them at their shop and then install them as separate boxes, but the custom sizing and functionality sold us… along with the cheaper price tag.

Here are the plans that we made with the local custom cabinet shop:

Notable features:

• A gas cooktop with a range hood that actually vents outside
• A built in trashcan and recycling bin between the sink and dishwasher so little hands stay out of them, we regain some floor space, and we can open the dishwasher while standing at the sink
• Larger drawers that can actually hold things
• Cabinets that go to the ceiling for maximum storage
• A single basin sink to maximize the functionality of the small space

Notable features:

• An actual pantry!!!
• Cabinets that go to the ceiling for storage
• Did I mention the pantry?!

I think this new kitchen will be much more functional. We will be adding in an island at a later date, but I think I’ll build that myself. Building one piece feels much less intimidating than building all of it.

This plan is still pretty involved on our end. We are responsible for prepping the whole space, including demo, building the pantry, moving plumbing and electrical and installing the gas line, along with all the final touches like painting the cabinets, attaching the hardware, getting the counters, and installing the appliances, but I think it’ll be so worth it in the end. Stay tuned for the next post for all the demo, which we’ve been working on the last few weeks!