Oh man, am I excited to give you a sneak peak of what our kitchen is going to look like. When we first saw the house, the kitchen was very small as most kitchens were back in the 1800’s. There was a broken sink, a fridge, a stove and one cabinet. As much as we want to keep this house original, we love to entertain and this kitchen just wont do.  I knew we couldn’t do this project fast enough on our own with two young children and we were not comfortable with judging the stability of the home with such a big project. Therefore, we reached out to my husband’s uncle, Chris Brumback who is a fantastic contractor.

We told him our dreams and before we knew it he already had the wall knocked down between the dining room and the kitchen. This opened up the room giving us a better visual of how we wanted the new layout….even with the random working stove sitting in the middle of the room.  We looked at some catalogs and found the type of cabinets we wanted, researched chalk paint and signed up for a class on how to distress them, talked to some friends about making our own concrete counter tops,  and figured we should upgrade a couple appliances. Only I could make a difficult project, impossible. I needed to call in the expert. There is only one person in the world who I trusted with helping me design my first kitchen and that is my mother.

My mother designed kitchens in the past and has a passion for renovations. In fact, there isn’t a day in the past 15 years that she didn’t have some sort of renovation project going on in her own home. I’m pretty sure her construction projects have paid off her contractors house. Chris got us in contact with the Cabinet Showplace to help with designing the cabinets and my mom was able to pick out every little detail from un-level floors, to maximizing my storage space. She spent hours taking measurements and working with the cabinet company designing the kitchen. One of the biggest lessons I learned is to not assume that your contractors (cabinet designers or appliance salesman) looked at every detail. After we chose the appliances (which there is a surprise with that so keep a watch out for that article) she made sure they fit properly within the cabinets and found mistakes that both the cabinet people and the appliance people missed! If I was in charge, this kitchen could have been a disaster. She read every spec of every manual and made my kitchen Top Chef quality. We learned all about the different qualities of plywood that the cabinets came in and added “soft close” drawers. We got little cabinet feet at the base of the cabinets and even added a neat farm sink. Now all I have to do is learn how to cook…