New Kitchen

For a while I'd been wanting to re-do some of our kitchen, but wasn't sure how to re-do parts of it and leave other parts the same. For instance, our counters were in really good shape, but I hated the wasted corner space in two corners of our kitchen and I wasn't fond of the boring beige coloring. A couple years ago or so, we had a water leak under our kitchen sink. We aren't sure how long it had been leaking when we found it, but after we cleaned it up we could tell that the cabinet under the kitchen sink was warped and the cabinet next to it had a moldy smell even after wiping it out with bleach.

So sometime in March last year we went to Ikea for something and I picked up one of their kitchen books. While some of their kitchen cabinets definitely were not anything I might like, some of them looked really nice and they are quite a bit less expensive than most places. I kept flipping through the catalog and even went as far as to measure our kitchen to get an idea of how much it would cost to replace our cabinets.

We knew we had some money coming to us in May so when Ikea ran a special to save 20% on a new kitchen we decided to go for it. We didn't replace our fridge, dishwasher or freestanding range/double oven but we did replace everything else including the garbage disposal, above range microwave and kitchen sink and faucet.

We shopped around and had different people handle different parts of the work in order to save as much money as we could - so we hired a contractor to rip out the existing cabinets and backsplash; install undercabinet lighting; paint the kitchen, breakfast room and family room; rip out a pony wall between the kitchen and breakfast room; relocate the dishwasher to the other side of the sink from where it was; install the new faucet, new garbage disposal and then the dishwasher. We hired a flooring company to rip up the existing tile floor and install the new floor and backsplash. We hired the company associated with Ikea to do the cabinet install and install the above range microwave and Ikea already contracts out the kitchen counter to a company who measured and installed the counter and kitchen sink.

I'm glad that we saved money, but it really was a pain to have so many different people that we worked with and trying to coordinate it all while minimizing the amount of time we were without a kitchen. Most frustrating was that they couldn't come map everything out for the countertop until the cabinets had been installed and then it was a 2 week wait after everything was mapped for the countertop install which meant 2 weeks of no work being done and still not having a kitchen to use.

Here's a little slideshow of the process: