The Kitchen Big Remodel

On the other side of the refrigerator wall was this room:

It was so narrow you really could not have a sofa in front of the fire place and still get around it. We were using it as a office/sewing room/ junk room (obviously!). Ugly rock on the fireplace, with cork squares above (which I painted green in an attempt to reduce the ugliness). Unfortunate because you had to walk through the end of the room to get to the bathroom we used all the time. In my defence, we had started to tear this room up to clear it out for the remodel when this pic was taken.

Here's that baby boy using a power tool to bust up rock.And Joe keeping a watchful eye on him. As you can see under the wallpaper was ugly, cheap panelling.

Looks better already! This all started because we just wanted to make this room pleasant to live in...maybe as an office. At this point my mom and I came in started musing about what a nice kitchen it would be if we could knock that wall on the right down. Joe decided that maybe we could and so the wall came down and the kitchen got knocked out.

In this picture, Joe and our BIL Kevin are working on getting the two floors the same level....the family room was an addition and an inch or so different from the kitchen. That's a new window behind them and over the sink area.

During this time Joe's job took him out of town for months at a time....so I cooked in the dining room where we moved our appliances and washed dishes in the new restaurant sink in the laundry room. We expected this to last 6 months but it streached to 2 years....pushing my sanity to the edge.
We decided to have our cabinets made by Dick Leonard in Cornell, IL. Using his software, this is the plan we came up with. We wanted the kitchen to be able serve as a sitting area also...so I wouldn't be lonely cooking any more. We left the fireplace where it was and planned built-ins around it. We have a sofa by the fire, but it would be cool to have a big table there if you wanted to have an eat in kitchen. We eat in the dining room all the time.

More in the next post......