Kitchen Renovation | Plans and Inspiration

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I’ve been a little quiet on here the last couple of weeks because we just started our biggest DIY to date – renovating our kitchen!! Our kitchen renovation start also coincided with school starting, cross country starting back up, and a sick kid, with just a cold, but still, nothing like a few crazy things happening all at once to make ya wonder if you might lose your mind! 🤪 I’ve been sharing the process on Instagram Stories, so if you’re into watching homes get demo-ed and then re-built, you’ll want to be following along there! For those not on Instagram, I thought I’d pop on here and share what we’ve been up to, our plans for the kitchen renovation and some of demolition photos too!

These first few images are the ones that have been inspiring me lately. I like neutral, earthy, and simple. And I’m hoping what I’m envisioning in my head can be translated into reality! Seventeen years of dreaming and hoping for this to happen has allowed for plenty of daydreaming…but now things just got very real and I’m feeling the pressure of all those decisions!

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kitchen cabinets with doors open on one set of cabinets
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wood shelves and wood cabinets in kitchen
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pantry cupboard opened showing organized shelves and drawers
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Our Plans:

white country farmhouse

In the picture above you can see what the side of our house looked like where the porch, kitchen and mudroom were (that side of our house was added on to the original house, which was built in the 1830’s). Our plan is to bump the front porch out a bit, and make it smaller (depth-wise, it’ll still be the width of the kitchen). Turn the existing porch into a dining room, update the kitchen (the floor space of that is staying the same), and expand the mudroom on the back. Our laundry room is connected to the kitchen, so we’ll be giving that a slight update as well, turning that into a laundry room/pantry combination. And we’ll be putting a second story above the kitchen and mudroom. Shew!

The process is a little more intense because we need to do some foundation work, so we have to take down the entire side of that house, put down new foundation, and then rebuild. Nothing like working with old houses! We’ll also just be working on the first level interior for now…the second story will be built, but not completely finished (like all the pretty finishing touches) until later on.

I am terrible at envisioning things, I have a hard time translating what’s in my head to reality. Thankfully Mike can usually figure out what I’m thinking, and he did a rough sketch of a couple parts of the kitchen…it made me excited for what’s to come! (And I should have scanned these a lot sooner, he did these quite a while back, and they’ve been spilled on, wrinkled, and drawn on a few times, but you get the basic idea from this!). Also, the second sketch with the stick figures and cat makes me laugh every time I look it at!

sketch of kitchen cabinets
sketch of kitchen cabinets

Our Demolition:

white house with men on porch roof working
father and son removing siding off house
house with siding removed
interior of kitchen under construction
house interior being torn down
side of house with part of it torn down
side of house covered by blue tarp

As you can see from these photos, we’ve got the side of the house taken down. Demo went pretty smoothly, and was fun for all the boys (both big & little 😉). We’re now in the phase of digging out underneath the former kitchen, porch and mudroom and will be working on putting in new foundation.

So, quite the big undertaking, right?! I know that things won’t go as planned and we’ll have some set backs, all normal things during renovations. I’ve been trying to mentally prep for this as best I can. Here’s hoping we can stay sane during this whole process! And let me know what you want to see/know from this whole process, I’m trying to do my best documenting, but if there’s certain things you want to see more of/know about, let me know!

-Manda

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