Kelly Home Renovations Update: Kitchen Remodel

The kitchen remodel is finally moving on to phase 2 and I am so excited! The subway tiled end is in sight! There are some beautiful pendant lights at the end of this tunnel and I cannot wait to share recipes with you from the final result, the heart of our home, our gorgeous new kitchen.

After removing the old cabinets, installing the new, replacing a wall of old wood windows, refinishing the original hardwood floors and installing my dream sink and faucet, my lovely and talented husband is due for a break. (More pictures from phase 1 of the remodel are here.) Plus, he has been working crazy hours on the office tower he is wiring downtown right now as a foreman (woop woop! promotion!) at his company. So, we brought in reinforcement talent,  my Uncle Dale and my dad.

Last week Uncle Dale removed the soffits and him and my dad installed a big glulam beam to support that end of the house, since the soffit was pulling some heavy duty structural work but we wanted the kitchen ceiling to be one lofty bright and light 10 foot height.

Over the weekend Troy put in an 8 hour day installing new outlets for my many appliances, wiring the new wall sconce and pendant lighting we have planned and demolishing the mirror cut out wall between the kitchen and the dining room. This mirror cut out is probably where the original wall telephone used to sit and was a unique historic feature of the house.

However, since I tend to spend a lot of happy time barefoot in my kitchen, and I prefer to be able to see my family while doing so, we will cut out half of this wall ( down to the cabinet height) and widen the doorway as much as possible with minimal structural affect. I think opening this wall up will create a really pretty visual straight through the house from the front door making it appear larger and improving flow and conversation.

This week Uncle Dale will sheetrock the ceiling and work on the wall removal. Once that is completed our next steps include adding tongue and groove boards to the ceiling, subway tile to the wall with the sink, designing and installing our open shelves, installing new pantry and basement doors, trimming out the room and finally painting. It’s a long process, and a segmented one since we are choosing to do a lot of the work ourselves, but well worth it for the heart of our home!

Our biggest goal now is to finish this work before the end of spring so that we can shift our attention outdoors to the garden, and finish all house and yard projects before the start of summer. We will reengage with renovation next winter. Last summer was a rough one with renovating, moving and preparing for baby with gigantically swollen feet so we look forward to a few months of r&r this year enjoying Washington’s beautiful summers as a family.

my apologies for picture quality in this post, I did my best with poor tools, my old cell phone camera 🙁