Cabin Kitchen Renovation – ORC Week 1

Hi Friends, it’s almost the weekend and that means we are are about to put on our game faces and get working on our cabin kitchen renovation as we are participating in the ORC. Let me set the stage for you and give you some insight into what we are working with.

When we moved in this was our kitchen…

A funny story about this house and that huge gun safe in the dining area. Supposedly, we bought our house from one of the local low level drug dealers and he kept all of his…shall we say “investments” and “earnings” in that safe. When he was gone one weekend someone decided that they should bust down the door, attach a chain from their truck to his safe and attempt to haul the safe out of the house. Apparently they were only successful in scratching up the floor HORRIBLY and requiring a new door and casing that creeks every time it’s opened ands closed. But they provided us with a great story and yet another reason to refinish the floors. We do have hope that one day we’ll bust open a wall and money will come pouring out but judging by the amount of repo men that came looking for him the first year we lived in this house he probably wasn’t at “wall money” level in his operation.

This brings me to my assessment of the kitchen…

Assessing the Situation

I had done a little “spruce” about a year after we moved in just to give the room a bit of a temporary facelift, make things a bit brighter and more functional for us. This let us live with the kitchen a bit longer and really hone in on the things we wanted to change. What were the pain points? What did we value most? What were the merits of the kitchen?

One of the biggest highlights of our kitchen is that it has texture, the other big advantage for me window placement, over the sink and in the dining area. The appliances were pretty old and the fridge went out quickly, can I count that as an advantage? It got me some new appliances that I wanted. That was in our spruce phase, which also included chopping down our island to be counter height. I had poured temp resin countertops at the time so that the island and the rest of the kitchen would match. They were cheap, easy to do and they really did make such a huge difference in adding light to the space. So we lived with our little spruce for two years, experimenting with how to incorporate a range hood. Could we could gain more storage for the pantry, was the island even necessary, could we add built-in seating?

The Plan

All of this questioning and planning lead us to our plan which overtime became:

• Take out the island completely – It gets in the way and hems in the traffic pattern of the kitchen, it also majorly limits the size of table that can be used in the dining area.
• Refinish the floors, obvious reasons.
• Relocate refrigerator to opposite wall.
• Remove current pantry and build a larger pantry beside/around new fridge location.
• Butcher block countertops.
• Two sets of European style cabinets that sit on the countertops.
• Open shelving
• Tile and plaster cooking alcove.
• Install an apron front farm sink.
• Shelving for baskets/ easy access kids stuff.
• Built-in China Cabinet and bench with storage underneath.
• Reface the current bottom cabinets, uppers build to match.

Conclusion

As you can see we have our work cut out for us! There is so much, but I are so excited to share with you all that we accomplish in this space. Here is my “design board” for the space.

Make sure you follow me on Instagram so that you can see behind the scenes looks at what we’re doing, about chopping down my island the first time, how I did those temp resin counters, stuff like that. Also, make sure you go check out all the participants of the ORC there is always so much inspiration and wonderful home renovation makeovers, I love it!