I realized the last few weeks that we’ll never be DONE done with the house, so here’s a before/after picture of the kitchen (June 2010 on the left, this morning on the right). Still waiting on the under-counter lights, the crown moulding and a few other details but we’re close to wrapping up the kitchen remodel. In sticking with our budget, we reused most of the old kitchen, including the existing appliances from the early 90s, and focused on finishes: new counters, new cabinet fronts from Kerf, new oak floors to match the rest of the house and a new stainless steel sink and faucet. In the end, we decided to replace the dishwasher and microwave. We’re still tweaking some of the cabinets to open up the wall of doors ‘n drawers and allow easy access to cutting boards and cook books.

In the entire house remodel we removed 3 doors and 2 sections of walls. We subtracted a fair amount of the crap that had been added since 1939 and really only added a master shower (after removing the existing rotted shower and spooky soaking tub). The wall and swinging door between the kitchen and dining room was easy to pull out and resulted in spacial awesomeness.

At the beginning of this remodel there was talk of meticulous documentation of the before/after progress and all the materials and design decisions along the way. Oops. I did take a lot of pictures, but they’re not a perfect before/after flip book. And I’m not this good at documenting material and design choices (nice work Mike). However, these photos are more-or-less in chronological order and give some perspective about how far we’ve come.