KITCHEN!
Husband and I have been planning to gut our kitchen and completely re-do it for a year now. We were going to start the design process in October, 2006. Suffice it to say we are already behind schedule. We settled on our design one week ago. Our overall vision is a Mission/Arts & Crafts style. I'll post pictures as I have them to give you a better idea of what I mean.
In the coming weeks and months I will be blogging about our experiences with this project. As it stands now we have ordered custom cabinetry and ordered our appliances. The cabinetry should be here at the end of May. I expect June to be our busiest month.
Here is a before picture (taken waaaay back in October):
Tuesday two guys came and tore down the wall between the kitchen and dining room. I was amazed at how much light was let in by our French doors in the dining room. Without that wall to swallow up all the light, the kitchen is now completely bright! I love it!
Of course, even this little chore--which really should have been pretty cut and dry--opened up a new can of worms. We knew that there is about a foot difference in the heights of the ceilings in the kitchen (about 8 feet) and dining room (about 9 feet). After removing the wall, it was apparent that our kitchen ceiling is actually a false ceiling and was inexplicably lowered to be 8 feet. It's also stuffed with insulation for some reason.
Now that we know we can pull down the existing kitchen ceiling and raise it to match the dining room, we are going to do that. However, instead of paying another $1000 for a crew to do it, Husband and I will be getting our hands dirty over the coming evenings.
We are going to tear down the drywall and deal with the insulation (yuck) and tear down the beams. Then a drywall guy will come in and hang a new ceiling and an electrician will come and fix all the electrical stuff.
We are off and running. So far, anyway.
