Our Kitchen Renovation Before & After

The photos below are what our kitchen/dining looked like when we moved in… It was the strangest layout. There was a wall that separated the dining area from the kitchen, making both feel closed-in and dark, but no wall separating the kitchen from the master bedroom. Ruh-roh. So we removed the wall between the dining area and built one to separate the kitchen and master.

Before:


After!

We replaced the squat window above the sink with one nearly twice as tall (before I had to stand on my tippy toes to see out of it!), added two more windows along the back wall and french doors where the broken sliding door had been. It was oddly short – Cam hit his head every time he managed to get it open!

Before:

After: So much light!


Cam custom-built the beams (he’s still going to add corner pieces), the open shelves and the oven mantle from pine trees that he cut down on our property and had milled.

This is a progress photo before he trimmed out the shelves, but I LOVE the two little nooks on either side of the oven where I store all my spices. Aren’t the blue tiles so pretty!? Cam did all of this and created exactly what I had in my head!

Before (open to the master) and cute Gracie girl:

After: a new wall and home for the oven. We also wrapped the refrigerator in cabinets and put in floor-to-ceiling cabinetry on the left side of the kitchen.

This is the back side of the new wall for the oven:

It’s still a small-ish kitchen, but it’s open, so bright and has a lot of storage space so it’s the perfect size to me. I love cooking here! And most of all love that I can see and talk to our kids now that it’s open to Cam’s beautiful dining table and the living room. Side note: the basket on the chair in the corner holds their coloring books, paper and art cases. Our dining table usually looks like a bomb went off- covered in all of that, but having their main art stuff right there encourages them to draw and color next to each other throughout the day which has been awesome.

This is what’s on the opposite wall from the kitchen:
Before:

After! Again, my husband beautifully created the vague description I gave him of what I was imagining…


We all love to read so the bookcases are beautiful and practical! We hired a contractor, structural engineer and electrician for all of the kitchen structural work and everything else was done by my husband. Talented man, indeed!! Our renovation last year took twice as long because of Hurricane Florence so we raced against time to finish before I gave birth to Mary and Cam deployed right after. He didn’t want to leave me with a half-functioning kitchen. Those were stressful weeks (and very hormonal too, haha), but he pulled it off and we all couldn’t love it more. The kitchen/dining/living area is where we spend all our time at home and it’s such a bright, happy spot to be!