We started renovating our kitchen in late September with a simple goal – to add functionality and appeal to our 1990’s traditional Texas home. Our initial plans involved darker moody tones that made a statement and brought a sense of playfulness and originality to the house.
To stay under our 20k budget, we decided to keep the floorplan and only move the refrigirator to the west wall next to the pantry. It’s a small kitchen but finding a way to manouver around it was difficult. We started off with a small island that took up most of the floor plan and a bahemuth of a refrifirator that blocked most of the passage from the kitchen to the dinnet area. The third biggest struggle for me was the pony wall that ran across the entire front of the kitchen blocking any light coming in from our adjacent windows. The kitchen wasn’t in bad shape and we lived in it for a year before making any changes.
But it was time and we were able to finalize our plans and move forward with a local contractor (more on our experience later)
Here’s how it looked when we moved in:
We brought in a contractor and started working on our initial design and inspiration.
Because we were keeping most of the floor-plan, we kept a lot of the existing cabinet frames. Our goal was to try and extend them to reach the ceiling without having to add additional doors or replace the cabinetry.
The biggest floor-plan change was the refrigerator. The existing location of the fridge was very tight, the fridge was massive and it blocked both the light and the walking space to get in and out of the kitchen. Our cabinet guy made a frame to enclose the fridge and adding the upper cabinets and the additional faux extension over the fridge.
Another big change was the pony wall. I disliked it so much and I can’t tell you how happy it made me to watch the demo take place. It was a small change that made such a huge impact. It allowed for more light to come into the kitchen and made our countertops more functional. This also meant that the additional four inches of a pony wall had to be removed leaving a hole to patch up with leftover tile.
All of the backsplash was removed and they were able to re route the water line to give me a pot filler. This was such a treat for me. I’ve always wanted one and it was one fo the details I was willing to part with if need be, but I am beyond grateful that I didn’t have to.
A lot of you guys were following our kitchen renovation on Instagram and were super encouraging as we struggled with our contractor to work out the problems with the paint.
The first time they painted, the contractor sent his “B” team who cut corners on the prep job. Now although this isn’t a post about bashing our contractor, all of these hiccups led us to change the color entirely, push a 3 week job to 2 months and spend way more than what we had originally agreed and budgeted for.
After two rounds of green paint, the contractor brought in his best painter who laughed at the previous job and after two weeks of around the clockwork of peeling, sanding, stucco-ing, priming and painting, we finally have our kitchen.
First round of paint – We asked for Jasper by Sherwin Williams. My dream was to have a moody kitchen with a lot of brass, and silver. It’s a rich dark green color that’s almost black. The painter ended up color matching and purchasing Benjamin moor which turned out to look more light blue than we asked for.
I knew something was wrong, but I thought maybe I picked the wrong color and I just had to deal with it. While Alex was walking the kitchen, he realized that all of the paint cans were painted on. The cans were completely covered in paint as to hide the brand and paint name. We found that this was odd and looked for all of the paint cans in the house. It turned out that there was one can that had not been painted on and it clearly said Benjamin Moore on it. We had a mild panic attack and tested out the Jasper that we originally asked for and for sure, it was a completely different color.
We called the contractor and he said he’d be by in the morning to take a look at it and agreed that the kitchen was painted the wrong color.
He asked the painters to come back and redo their work. We asked them to sand, re caulk, re prime and then re paint. We ended up leaving the house for the weekend and came back to the right color but it had been ROLLED ON ALL OF THE CABINETS. Nothing was sanded or re-caulked. It was just painted on top of the original wrong color paint. It was a nightmare and the entire kitchen was ruined. There was paint all over the backsplash, the caulk lines were webbed throughout the entire kitchen, and there were so many areas that didn’t have any of the requested color on them.
When we were gone, our contractor sent us an image of the kitchen and gave us a thumbs up saying that the color is perfect and that the kitchen was done. When we returned from our trip Alex and I were floored and couldn’t believe what a terrible job the contractor and painters had done. At this point, we were ready to call in a different crew and not pay the contractor for the mess they left us.
The next morning the contractor stopped by and we walked him through the entire kitchen pointing out all of the areas where our backsplash, caulk line, counter tops were painted and showed him all the “orange peel” roller marks that were left throughout the entire kitchen.
Again, he agreed that it was a poor job and assured us that he’d fix it and make it right.
At this point, we wanted nothing to do with the original painters and asked for a new crew to come and fix the problem. The contractor ended up bringing in his “good” paint team who took one look at the kitchen and were as terrified as we were. They were shocked at the quality of work and could’t believe that this is what the contractor signed off on.
Over the course of a week, the painters sanded the paint down (including all of the webbed corners) and used bondo to fix a lot of the issues that the first two coats of paint caused. It looked like scenes from a horror movie, but at this point, we were so happy that the new painters were working towards fixing the problem.
After everything was sanded down, and primed, I decided to change the color completely. I felt like I wanted a new start from the mess and headache that this Reno had caused me so I did a little research and landed on Accessible beige by Sherwin Williams. I was pressed for time and didn’t have an opportunity to test out the color on the cabinets, but after research and seeing reviews and images on Pinterest, I made a gut call. The paint turned out so much better than I imagined.
The last issue was the vent hood installation. The contractor measured out a vent hood that was bigger than the vent hood opening and we spent another 2 weeks trying to figure out how to cut the vent hood opening to make it big enough to insert the hood. During this time, they were also working on adding the hardware and install the refrigerator.
Gosh it seems like that last sentence took no time at all, but it was such a headache that took over a week and a half.
The appliances were tough to come by as well. We ordered the refrigerator, oven and stovetop back in September and due to the pandemic, everything was on backorder.
Everything came together at the end so we are taking this experience and are moving forward from it. We’ve learned a few things along the way and although there are still a lot of errors, we are accepting the space as it is and are moving forward with our kitchen.
It’s way better than what we had before and I love how functional it is and how spacious and beautiful it looks.
