The big kitchen reveal - Our $2300 entire kitchen renovation!

I am so, so excited to share with everyone our kitchen reveal!I have been posting for weeks about the little updates that we have been doing since we moved in, but we are now finally at the point where everything in the kitchen is finished (for the most part - there will always be little updates!)

I'll start with a few before and afters, as I love to see the difference! My favorite parts - the floors, and the white cabinets (previously cream and black..ugh!)

This is my favorite view in the whole room,  the view I get every time I walk into the kitchen from the main hallway. It's where I see the most of my floors, plus our beloved picnic dining table (passed down to me by my parents - my dad even had it shipped here from cross country from Edmonton!)
 

You also get a great view of the light fixture Joel made using reclaimed wood and mason jars.

 

Isn't that little ladder cute? My neighbor was throwing it out last week and I grabbed it! I want to find something to put on top of it, but can't decide what, yet.

Here's a better view of the floors. I still can't get over them! I'm so relieved that Joel loves them as much as he does, because I sort of dumped the idea of doing herringbone floors on him, and they ended up being a LOT of work.

Here's what we see when entering the kitchen from the living room. This is around where the picnic table is:

Here's the floating shelves that we made. They've held up really well so far, and are so much more convenient than closed shelves!

 And finally, one more shot of the sink area.  The apron front sink has been one of the best changes that we've made in the kitchen. It's huge and lovely and it cleans up so easily. 

I am so happy to be finished our kitchen. This was a long project. We worked for months on almost all aspects of our kitchen, including:

• building wood counters from doors ($100)
• installing an apron front sink ($250 on kijiji)
• changing our cabinet orientation (free!)
• painting the cabinets ($150)
• installing new hardware ($70)
• building floating shelves (sponsored by Lowe's)
• ripping up our ceramic floors (free, but annoying!)
• installing hexagonal backsplash (about $150 including tiles, grout, and tile nipper tool)
• installing herringbone hardwood floors part 1, part 2, part 3 coming soon! ($750 for the flooring from Seaway Cabinets and Flooring, plus another $400 or so in equipment rental, stain, verathane, and other random expenses, for a total of $1150)

and many other things that never even made the blog (painting all of the baseboards, painting the door frame, installing potlights, buying a new faucet, etc.), the expenses of which totaled about $400.

I'm really proud of us for doing this all for $2300. With the amount of things we want to do in our house, it just isn't reasonable for us to spend a lot of money on renos. Doing our kitchen so cheaply meant we had to work slowly, using what we had, or waiting for sales (or kijiji deals.) Things like buying flooring took us weeks, as we scoured for deals and worked out every possible way for them to be the least expensive possible. But in the end, the patience was so worth it!


And now, we are on to the next projects! Joel's busy working on a huge, beautiful new lighting project for our TV room. He came up with this one all by himself, and I am so excited to see it finished! I'll make sure to post pictures when he's done.

Have a great week!