Friday, July 6, 2012

Kitchen Remodel

We have finished all our home projects for now. Just in time too because we've run out of money. I have to brag a little bit because I did pretty much all of it myself, but I'll give Chris his credit where it is due. We didn't really like having a washing machine in the kitchen so that started the entire process. Since we got our new stacked washer and dryer, we had an empty space in our kitchen for quite some time and finally decided to do something about it.
Here are the before pictures.




I shopped around all the black Friday sales after Thanksgiving and found a good price on the dishwasher we have been wanting and also bought an oven on a impulse. (I am not an impulsive buyer and am very careful with what I spend so when I splurge I buy ovens.) We got both appliances for under $650 total so I feel good about that. We knew we wanted to replace the oven sometime before we sold the place so we figured now was as good as any. The oven gets delivered and installed, and the dishwasher gets delivered and sits in a box in our living room.
In order to change things structurally with our place we have to get approval from our housing board and it's a really annoying process. I was so frustrated getting the approval for the W/D I made Chris get approval for the dishwasher. We ended up needing to do some more electrical work to make our kitchen up to code. Apparently we moved in with it not up to code and would have had to change it anyway when we want to sell.  Annoying. We got the work done. I figured out how to move part of the cabinet without destroying the countertop and was pleased. We then had our friend Steve help us out with the installation of the dishwasher.   He and Chris spent quite a long time getting it to work because we had to use copper tubing instead of a braided hose so it was a big ordeal that I didn't do anything for. We are extremely grateful for the help. We then had to get a new countertop to fill in the gap. After way to much research we decided to tile. I got some plywood to build up the gap.

Then began tiling away. We got granite tiles and had to make so many trips to home depot to find all the little things that I needed. I ended up using both granite and ceramic tiles to avoid cutting the granite too much because it ended up that our little cutter didn't work. We had to get pretty creative with the tile we did have to cut. Chris helped some in this effort. I figured out how to lift up the sink and fit the tiles under there and kept tiling away. In the end it got done and I'm not sure if all the trouble was work the amount we saved, but it is nice.


And just because I was in a tiling mood I re-tiled and painted our table. The grout in the table was all broken so I've been wanting to re-tile it ever since we were in Utah. I still think this before picture is great.