My Re-use, Re-cycle Kitchen Re-do!!

Well, it’s taken me a few days to get back here, but I am really excited about my kitchen plan!! After we got started last week, my kitchen project came to a standstill. I have discovered a sure way to bring in work for my self-employed husband. Start him on a project at home! As an electrical contractor, things have been a little, well a lot, slow. As soon as we start tearing the kitchen apart he gets work! Not complaining though. We lost a few days because there were things I needed him to do but as soon as he was free we got started again. I figured I’d work while he was available and blog about it later. 

Before I lay out my  “Re-use, Recycle and Re-do the Kitchen Plan”, I want to give you some background. My kitchen has had the refrigerator and stove on one wall and the dishwasher and sink on others. It was very spread out with a table in the middle of it all. The biggest drawback of the layout is that the outside door and doorway into my utility room/pantry  were on the same side as my stove and fridge, with the fridge coming out into the doorway of the utility room. We didn’t start taking pictures ‘til the refrigerator was already moved, but you can see the space where it was. To the left of the ladder is the white doorway to the utility room. You can see that if you walked straight out of the utility room, you would hit the refrigerator. You had to go in and out of there on an angle.

So why did we start with the refrigerator? Because I have a special friend who knew we were using a refrigerator that was so old that it is “almond” and has definitely seen better days!

She shared an extra one she has had with us! It’s bigger, white and not falling apart, see it has both top and bottom handles! It went directly to it’s new spot in the kitchen.

Thank you special friend! I figured that if we were going to be moving the refrigerator anyway, that it would be a great time to start my kitchen project even if it was the beginning of November! The only obstacle would be getting hubby on board. I began by explaining why I wanted to move everything off of the stove/refrigerator wall and gave reasons he would agree with, like everything on that wall is basically in the pathway of the outside door to the utility room door. That made it hard when we brought in firewood. Then I  followed with the idea that things would flow better with all the appliances close and on the same side. He liked both reasons, but still didn’t realize how easy this was going to be because our cabinets were mostly in sections already. We had put them together to work for us when we first got them. Not only that, but the cabinet sections were going to fit without ANY cutting!  I had already measured. Hubby had to measure for himself. After measuring and re-measuring to be sure, he said “hey, this is going to be pretty easy!”  Uh-huh, I already knew that!  Glad to have you aboard honey! Then I laid out the plan for him in full:

1. Move refrigerator and stove almost directly across the kitchen to opposite wall.

2. Take out the cabinets that were on the opposite wall and replace them with the cabinets that fit from the other wall.

3. Re-paint cabinets black and walls beige. Buy new knobs for cabinets.

4.Put open shelving on the now empty wall. May have some cost here….

5. Re-do bakers rack and put it on the empty wall. May need more black spray paint.

6.Lay new tile on floor. Will need glue and grout.

7.Tile over formica countertops. Biggest expense is here for the tile, more glue and more grout.

8. Find a trim color and paint the trim….another expense, unless I win another contest and more free paint!

Should be pretty fast and easy, right? Well, the fridge is moved…