Our kitchen has changed a lot since we bought this house 4 years ago. This room just keeps getting updated, no matter how finished we think we are! We had to start from scratch in this room, as you can see:
The appliances no longer worked, the counters were cracked, and the cabinets had stains and chips inside and out. We wanted more cabinets and counters, too. Of course, the room looked a whole lot worse before it looked better. The second and third pictures below show the room when we moved in. No stove yet -- we didn't eat any cooked foods for a while!
We love IKEA, and for 3 years we wished we could own one particular showroom kitchen. We loved the white cabinets and the matching dishwasher with the cabinet front on it, we dreamed of having drawers instead of cabinets and all the neat little organizing features IKEA offers. Buying this house gave us the opportunity we'd dreamed about!
When it was all installed, we breathed a sigh of relief.
Then we changed it a few months later! Our ideas about how to use this space kept shifting. At first, we put an IKEA island in the middle of the room. It had shelves in the front, and two tall chairs at the back. Next, we created a little eating nook by removing the chairs and adding a round table against the back. Chris put an L-shaped bench from Target around the table, and it looked great! Here's what that looked like on Valentines Day 2011:
When it was all installed, we breathed a sigh of relief.
Then we changed it a few months later! Our ideas about how to use this space kept shifting. At first, we put an IKEA island in the middle of the room. It had shelves in the front, and two tall chairs at the back. Next, we created a little eating nook by removing the chairs and adding a round table against the back. Chris put an L-shaped bench from Target around the table, and it looked great! Here's what that looked like on Valentines Day 2011:
Chris, as usual, saw areas for improvement soon after this change. In 2012, he took out the table and bench when he renovated the downstairs. We bought two more chairs and made the island a seating/workspace area.
The kitchen feels so open an airy! I thought this was perfect. Chris, being the visionary guy that he is, still sees more possibilities. The new plan is to move our entry door down where the window is, put the fridge where the door is and the island where the fridge is! We'll have another cabinet and counter between the new fridge and door places. Also, he wants to make a mudroom outside the new doorway so we have a better place for coats and shoes. That will be wonderful. It'll also mean this room being covered in plastic tarps, filled with sawdust and dirt, and a few days of the kids and I being out of the house all day. Someday we'll do it, when we have the time, money and energy. Right now, Chris is busy with something else: sanding the new beds he built this weekend in the girls' bedroom!