My kitchen has gone through so many phases of renovation, I’m not sure where to start. As soon as we moved in I took down all the upper cabinets, removed an eight foot vent hood that separated the kitchen from the living room, and relocated the refrigerator and water heater. That just made it workable. Then I installed floating shelves made of hollow core closet doors from our old house. I trimmed out the cabinet doors with lattice moulding and painted them out. I made cabinets out of file cabinets, removed a bar sink and built another pantry cabinet to replace it, and what feels like a never ending list of projects. So, to avoid a run-on post I’ll just write about today’s phase. Changing my U-shaped kitchen to an island kitchen.
This is how the kitchen looked the other morning. Beast had the morning free so I recruited his help. He’s usually willing to help if there’s demo involved. The strategy was pretty simple. Take out the oven, remove the cabinet and move base cabinets down to make and island. We started by unhooking the double oven and removing it. Then we simply cut away the cabinet around it with the sawzall.
That alone made a huge difference, right!?
Then we sawzall’d the cabinet away from the corner cabinet and slid it on down the line. I thought I would be able to re-use the cabinet as the island but it proved to be to difficult to make it work with a slide-in range. Instead I found two 30 inch drawer cabinets at habitat for humanity that I’ll use on either side of my range for the island.
So here’s my kitchen this morning.
Next up:
- cut a trench in my concrete floor with a concrete saw to accommodate the conduit and wire.
- pull the wire out of the electrical panel(which is fortunately in the kitchen wall) to re-wire it through the floor.
- finish the garbage cabinet next to the dishwasher (possibly my favorite part of this phase). I love having the garbage put away in a cabinet!
- take out this island of cabinets and replace it with my new drawer cabinets and slide-in range.(you can see the tip of it in the pic above in the middle of my family room).
- make a new concrete countertop for the island.
- put ship-lap siding on the back and sides of the island to match the walls in kitchen.
- paint the island.
- possibly take out the bulkhead above the island.
- put in a range hood above the stove.
- replace my decoupaged floor with wood to match the rest of the house.
- epoxy paint the fridge white.
- re-organize and get rid of stuff.
What do think? I think its coming along nicely.
This is the other end of the kitchen behind the wall. Just wanted to give the full layout.
