THIS IS STILL A WORK IN PROGRESS
The kitchen needed some serious work. Not only was everything in the kitchen original, but the original stuff was ugly and dysfunctional. I wanted to create a space that was inviting and pleasing to be in. I wanted the kitchen to be a place that was fun to cook and bake in with my family and would be a place where memories can be made with any future owner or my family and I while living here.
To start, we had to remove all the old cabinets. I would have liked to keep some of them but I wanted to change the layout of the kitchen entirely. Not only that, but they were very old falling apart. Once all of the cabinets were out, we needed to create a plan of attach for our next goal.
This goal was to remove the wall separating the kitchen and the living room. To make this happen, we had to put 2 2x12x16 structural beams in the attic to support the roof and ceiling from collapsing. The boards were bolted together and put into place. Each board in then was attached to the beam with big industrial brackets (which was overkill but since we were talking about structure, overkill is way better than underkill). We also need to add material to where the new beam in the attic would be resting on. Each side of the beam would rest on 6 studs to support the load of the entire wall. This way we were able to create the allusion that the wall was never there.
Then we got all the cabinets and appliances in. I bought some RGB led light strips from amazon and taped them to the bottom and tops of my cabinets for under and over cabinet lighting. This turned out pretty good but if you do this yourself, I highly recommend that you buy all the same strips to get the color matching right. I bought 1 long strip and 2 short ones, and the whites don’t match between the two very well. I ordered my cabinets from my local Home Depot and installed them myself. I found my appliances on Facebook Marketplace for a really good deal only being two years old.
The next step was to find, buy and have installed counter tops. There is a local supplier that I when with and the counter tops were installed within a months’ time. They are granite, they were affordable, I love them. We ended up doing a foot overhang going into the living room for a breakfast bar. It is amazing to have all that counter space for cooking, eating, playing games, and more. The size was about fifty square feet with the one foot overhang.
Now that the cabinets and appliances are in, the only things left to do is pot lights, pendant lights over the island, cosmetics, drywall, and flooring. Flooring will be done when we do flooring throughout the entire house. Lights got put in and we are just waiting for the drywall to be done.
I have learned so much though this project and I highly recommend you try it as well. YouTube is your best friend. Do your research before you start (There are thousands of YouTube videos on this topic), and when you get stuck, some else has gotten stuck too and has made a video about it on YouTube! Have fun and be safe!