Our Completed Kitchen Remodel + photos!
Happy weekend!
I am SO excited to share with you our newly remodeled kitchen! We started this process back in October and finished around Spring of this year. It took us a few months but I can't believe we did bulk of the work by ourselves! When I say we, I mean Patrick and his dad. Moral support counts right? ;)
Just to provide some background, our Mid Century Modern home was originally built in 1950s and the original specs were about 850 square foot. The previous owners expanded into the lot and now it has doubled in size! While that is awesome, the original kitchen was still very small. The kitchen and dining space was separated from the living room, which made the space feel tight. You can see our original Home Tour video (5:00) to see what it looked like before the remodel. When we bought the house, we knew we wanted to knock down that wall to make it one open floor plan, which is exactly what we did!
Demo day
The very first thing we did was knock down the wall and take down the cabinets. If you saw our Home Update Vlog, you may have seen that Patrick and his dad did all the demo themselves! It was fun at first, but we ran into an unexpected problem. Before we took the whole wall down, Pat saw that the ceiling rails did not line up, which meant it was a load bearing wall! We ended up building a temporary wall to hold it up while we got a wooden beam to support it. We got this giant 14ft beam from Austin Hardwoods and had 3 guys hold it up to install it. It definitely added to our timeline but I actually really like the way it looks. Everything works out at the end!
Homie Depot
After putting up the beam, we installed our cabinets. We decided on these dark gray Thomasville shaker cabinets from Home Depot and I absolutely love how it looks. For our hardwares, we found these geometric knobs from CB2 and I'm obsessed with both the hexagon and bar pulls. The brushed brass matches with our faucet which we got from Wayfair. And can we talk about this farm house sink? I've always wanted a ceramic farm house sink and we found this one from Friedmans. We also bought a dishwasher (yay!) and a new stove. We've been hand washing everything since we moved in so it was amazing to get a dish washer. Our washer, stove and vent are all from Whirpool!
Coffee in the mornin
We wanted to add more seating area in the kitchen so we decided to extend the countertop to create a breakfast bar. This is probably one of the best decisions we made because we use this bar every single day! For the countertop stone, we went with quartz. We knew we wanted something that looked similar to carrara marble but wanted something more durable and stain resistant. After researching, we found this beautiful quartz with similar carrara-like veins. I love how it looks like marble but isn't as high maintenance! Because of the layout, we had to buy two big slabs so we used the extra slab to create the waterfall by the breakfast bar (and also our master bath countertop.) For the bar, we scored these industrial stools from Restoration Hardware Outlet in Long Beach. Can you believe they were under $40 each?!
To the window, to the wall
Okay so we didn't do anything to the window, but we did add a ton of tile to the wall! We found these slightly larger subway tiles and took it all the way to the ceiling. We chose a medium gray grout for both look + function and are so happy with the way it came out! In addition, we also installed open shelves from walnut we bought from Austin Hardwoods. It was very technical to drill in which Pat shares more in detail in the Home Tour pt 2 video. Surrounding the subway wall, we added white shiplap to the ceiling and 2 other walls. Being a fan of Fixer Upper, I fell in love with shiplap and I'm especially happy we added it to the ceiling! We also added a charcoal accent wall in the dining area and it just makes everything pop.
Feeling Grounded
Finally, let's talk about the floors. The countertop and floors were the only two things we outsourced and it was well worth it. With the new open floor plan, we knew we wanted to have everything cohesive. Originally, the floors were a mix of wood laminate, carpet and tile and none of it matched. So for our remodel, we picked out this cool toned wood laminate to tie in with the gray cabinets. Rainbow Carpet from Cerritos did an amazing job, I would highly recommend them to anyone local to OC. Now onto the best part - photos!
Before & After
& That's a wrap!
If you'd like to see a video version of our Kitchen Remodel, check out our Home Tour Pt 2 video! This was highly requested so we made sure to film it for you guys. Video is still a new thing for us so please let me know what you think as well as what other things you'd like to see!