Kitchen Makeover--Before and After!

Okay, as promised, here are the before pictures of our kitchen, taken with a cell phone by our cheerful and hard-working Home Depot installer, right before he started the job early Monday morning.

And here are the after pics he snapped late Wednesday afternoon, just after he'd cleaned up and loaded his tools into his van.

It's amazing that this could be accomplished in three days, isn't it?

The installer's shots are pretty good, but they don't really tell the whole story.  So I'm going to share some pictures that I took, after I loaded all the cabinets, drawers, and counters back up with our stuff.

I love the way this kitchen turned out!

The cabinets are absolutely beautiful, and they have bead board inserts that give them that "farmhouse" look that I've always loved.

Better yet, I now have these wonderful pull-out drawers where I used to have a cavernous space jam-packed with stuff that was so hard to get at, I dreaded having to reach around in there to find what I needed.

I used to let my Tupperware containers sit in the dish drying rack for ages, in order to put off putting them away--unless I was in the mood for a challenging game of Extreme Tetris, played while kneeling.  But not anymore!

My old Lazy Susan was in not-so-great shape.

So I'm loving this new one, which isn't attached to the door like the old one was, but instead has a separate bi-fold door.  And each tier of my new Sue turns independently of the other.  It's very cool.

My gorgeous new cabinets, topped off with classy crown moldings, are great for showcasing my decorative pieces (and by that I mean mostly my pig collection).

Hey, remember this window?

Well, look at it now! 

I decided to move a piece that I had across the room (a secondhand wooden pie safe that I use as a pantry), so that it's up against the end of the cabinets.  Now I have room for my cookbooks on top of that (they used to be almost inaccessible, on a narrow shelf in the back of the crowded cabinet where I stored my pots and pans); also, the back of this pantry forms a nice little niche for the Keurig, so that I have a cozy little "coffee bar" area at the end of the counter.  Love it.  (And those Command hooks that look like metal are my new faves.)

While we were at it, my husband and I decided to change the position of our table, a gorgeous tile-topped oak trestle table that he made years ago, specially designed to be long and narrow so that it would fit in our kitchen, which is not really set up very well to be an eat-in kitchen for a family of seven.  (Our dining room is enormous, but our kitchen is not.)  The trestle table is now pushed up against the wall opposite the window, since it is usually just two of us eating here most nights anyway.  It makes a nice office space for me, too, if I want to write in my new kitchen (which I DO!).  For the first time since we moved into this house 24 years ago, it feels like we have a wide-open, spacious kitchen.

On the wall opposite the window, we used to have an enormous bulletin board--3 and 1/2 feet by 7 and 1/2 feet.  My husband bought a huge sheet of thick corkboard from Home Depot, which he screwed into the wall, and then he fashioned a wood frame for it (he can do anything, that guy).  We felt we needed it when the boys were young, to keep track of all the school and sports schedules and newsletters, party invitations, and whatnot.  We have outgrown it, though; we started to weed through all those scraps of paper recently and found the funniest things up there: receipts from ten years ago, expired coupons, our oldest son's address from his deployment to Iraq in 2009, you name it.

So this summer my husband took it down, with our youngest son's help.

I'm not really sorry to see it go.  But sniff, sniff...first the big red 15-seater van, my old house on wheels that was perpetually filled with an assortment of candy wrappers and empty Mt. Dew cans, the dirt of a thousand football fields, and the faint odor of sweaty lacrosse gear--and affectionately known as the "garbage scow"; now the world's biggest--and some have said, most hideous--bulletin board.  I'm saying good-bye to a messy but happy era.  A wonderful, although not always picture-perfect, part of my life is truly coming to an end!

But there is a consolation prize: a pretty new kitchen.  :)

I'm currently at work on that very empty, very white wall where the bulletin board used to be, and I'll be sure to post pictures when I get it fab-looking enough to be in the same room with my awesome new cabinets.

Well, for those of you who said you were excited to see the "after" pictures, I hope you enjoyed these.  For those of you who weren't all that interested in taking a tour of my kitchen, sorry 'bout that.  But I'll leave you with this: if you can't afford to do a complete renovation but would like to give your tired old kitchen a whole new look, have your kitchen cabinets refaced--I can't recommend it highly enough.  Home Depot was so great to work with on this project, every step of the way (and they're not even paying me to say that!).