This kitchen is probably the coolest thing I’ve ever done in my entire life, so here’s a million pictures of it.

When I was a kid, I fashioned a crane out of Legos and aluminum foil and won third place in some sort of crafty kids competition. For nearly two decades, that Lego crane would stand out as the crowning achievement on my list of weird crafty accomplishments (ok, I might have gotten really into felting once and made a couple of sassy, stuffed female reproductive organs with googly eyes that were also freaking amazing, but I digress…)

Now, on the tail-end of the crazy / dark comedy / coming of age / Eat Pray Love journey that has been our kitchen makeover, I can proudly share the project that has officially demoted that Lego crane to second place.

Our kitchen.

First, let’s take a look at…

The Before:

Warning: below are several graphic, highly disturbing images of a really ugly kitchen. Proceed with caution.

This kitchen was a huge “but…” for us when we found our house. We knew it’d be an incredibly ambitious and challenging (and expensive) undertaking to turn this into our dream kitchen.

That said, we had a very specific vision for our kitchen… and the more we looked at other houses, the more we realized that we’d probably have to do the same work (replace cabinets, countertops, upgrade appliances, etc.) for any kitchen we found.

So… we decided to go for it.

I documented every step of the way (because of course I did), and you can track our progress from the very beginning by checking out these project-specific posts:

1. Tearing out the old cabinets
2. Shopping for new cabinets
3. Removing that awful backsplash
4. Shopping for new appliances
5. Cabinet installation
6. Shopping for new quartz countertops
7. Countertop installation
8. Plumbing our Domsjo sink
9. Tiling the wall behind our bar
10. Mounting floating shelves over the bar
11. Installing a subway tile backsplash
12. Creating a chalkboard wall

Several projects (and lots of stubbed toes, sore backs, and pairs of grout-stained yoga pants later…) here’s where we ended up.

The After:

Let Trinidad James set the mood with some background music (just replace “gold” with “white”…)

Side by side…

Of course a project this massive never really feels “done.” We tore out our cabinets in October, and now it’s March and we’re still tweaking, fixing, and scheming.

I imagine that feeling never goes away… there’s always more that can be done (and we haven’t even really started decorating yet…)

At least the worst is behind us.. (right??)