The Kitchen Saga......

What follows is an account of my kitchen and the domino effect remodeling it had on my life.

This is one of the main reasons I haven't updated the blog with astronomy stuff and why I am opening up the format of my blog a little.

Be warned, this is a long post.

Without further ado..

This is what my kitchen looked like when I moved into my house.

That was 2004 and this is my first house.

Fast forward to 2008, while I was out of town this happened.

It was an accident that flooded my kitchen and forced me into an unplanned kitchen remodel.

I had always planned on remodeling the kitchen, this event just forced me into it before I was really ready to.

This set in motion a series of remodeling projects over the next couple years which would leave the kitchen usable but ultimately unfinished for over 4 years.

The kitchen was 80% complete finished by June 2008.

We still had to figure out the transition from the tile to the dining room and the trim had yet to be installed or finished.

We took a little break and started back up in October 2008.

During that session, we put the cabinets and drawer fronts on, finished some of the trim, wired the house, and started some work on the theater.

We also had the insulation in the attic replaced.

One of the significant changes was replacing the stair between the kitchen/dining room with a small landing that is more stable.

this landing presented a problem since it wasn't fully finished due to the fact that we had no idea how we were going to finish the theater room.

In December 2008, we got engaged which put our home improvement plans on hold while we started working on the wedding which was happening in 2010.

In April 2010 we finally settled on a design for the theater.

On the left is the before, on the right is the after.  

The landing remained unfinished.  This left the trim in the kitchen unfinished which in turn left the kitchen unfinished.

The wedding was in October, and the remainder of the year was spent preparing and recovering from it.

The next project was a nicer desk that I had built in the dining room looking into the kitchen.

The temporary, proof of concept version was a cheap Ikea table that I had screwed to the wall with a 2x4.


Once finished, we extended the dining room floor a little allowing us to move the desk further towards the theater leaving more room for the kitchen table.

The landing was still unfinished because the floor extension that we built hadn't been drywalled yet.  We completed the desk in the spring of 2011.

We refinished the floors in the front living room in the fall of 2011, which resulted in finishing the transition between the kitchen and the dining room, and the transition between the dining room and the front living room.

This is what I started with

This is what I ended up with.

Finally we get to 2012.  I spent a significant amount of time thinking about how I wanted the transition from the dining room to the theater to look.

With the baby on the way, I put my plans into action.

And THIS was the final piece of trim that was first removed in 2008, and was finally replaced in 2012.

Thus, the kitchen saga comes to a final conclusion.

4 years

Untold trips to Lowes, Home Depot, Ace Hardware, and other home improvement stores

 Hundreds of hours of planning, internet research, and manual labor.

All down to one piece of trim.

The kitchen is finished, but the home improvement will continue.