Our Kitchen

 It's done.  It's finally, finally done.  After two full weeks of plowing through heavy renovations, we finished our beautiful kitchen.  I'm excited to share the final results with you all!





Here is the view from when you walk in the front door.  We took the walls back to the brick.  The most common question we get is, "Isn't it cold in your kitchen?"  The answer is, not at all.  I don't find it any colder than before.  The thing with these old houses is that there isn't any insulation in the walls anyways.  The double brick is all the insulation these houses need.  And we had some pretty darn cold days this week - so it was a good test to see how it would hold up.

Here is my little cooking corner.  I have a perfect little nook for my mixer, and cute little shelves to house my cooking oils.
 

Here is the view from the dining room.  Would you believe those cabinets we found used on Kijiji?  I gave them a good paint job, updated the hardware, and voila!  Kitchen for a fraction of the price.

 

 Our house isn't gigantic, but we don't need a huge house.  We just need it to be functional.  The openess of the kitchen now lets me see right into the living room - so the little ones can play away instead of constantly being under foot.

 Because we had such large savings in so many areas of the renovation by doing all the work ourselves, we were able to splurge on a few things.  One of these things were these pendant lights.  At $50 a light (thanks Ikea!) that was a splurge for me!

Another splurge was upgrading the appliances to stainless steel.  We know of this place called Rosehill Auctions in Fort Erie.  They have brand new appliances for extreme discounts.  I got the fridge, stove and dishwasher for $850.  They are all brand new and work perfectly fine.  They had little defects (which were fixable!) so we got them for a sneeze.
 

I could spend all day in here.  Oh wait - I pretty much do :)
 

A fantastic clear line of vision to the front door and the living room from where I stand washing dishes.  The hutch in the front room is a piece I'm working on.  (Blog post about that one soon!)

And finally, the newly refinished antique island.  I landed up refinishing this piece with a minwax gel stain.  It allowed me to freshen up the finish of the piece without sanding it down.  I will write a blog post on the details of refinishing it tomorrow.  Until then, I will leave  you with the final picture.

 

 That was fun.  Now back to work on furniture!