Our kitchen facelift

The guys just finished our kitchen renovation this morning, and I am so happy! We went the entire week last week not being able to use our kitchen at all, so I am pretty happy to be able to make meals again. We are super happy with how it turned out. 

Before: bubbly cabinet doors, weird fluorescent lights above the top cabinets, white dishwasher, appliance garage, countertop that had seen better days.

On day 1, the guys got to work removing cabinets and changing the lighting. At this point they ended up having to redo the location of the lighting because the reality looked different than the drawing they were working with. I have never been involved in renovating anything ever before, but I was grateful that the guys didn't just follow the drawing that the designer and I had come up with. In real life, shifting the lighting and the shelves a few inches made a huge difference to the feel of the room.

Ready for countertop installation on day 2. They put up a few cabinet doors, which are way cleaner-looking than our old ones. They also had installed the doors with "soft close" hinges, which I absolutely hated due to the fact that it took a full minute to fully close any door. So they removed them. They must have been loving me at that point.

New counters. The designer chose this caesarstone countertop very early on, and I had never ever seen a sample. We love it, luckily. Also, the floating shelves were much chunkier than I figured they would be, so we decided to do two on each side instead of the planned three.

The tiles are the oversized subway tiles. They seemed huge at first, but I think our kitchen is big enough that it can handle it. Also love our new dishwasher.

Finished! We are really happy with it. The biggest thing is that it feels like we have more counter space, even though we don't. And the kitchen just feels so much better and brighter. Though I do kind of feel like now it would be nice to get a new fridge and new flooring, BUT that is not going to happen for a long time. We have a huge list of things we want to do in this house, and the next thing is probably the master bathroom. Also on our list: powder room, laundry room, and then we just need a ton of furniture. We will be taking things really slow as our finances permit.