Kitchen Remodel
Before and After
In late 2004, we undertook a project to remodel the kitchen of our house in Broomfield. Other than a new fridge and dishwasher, it hadn’t been updated since it was built in 1974. We hired Bob Martin as primary contractor. He designed a whole new kitchen for us and then led the remodeling effort.
The old kitchen was gutted down to the studs and everything - plumbing, electrical, cabinets, counters, etc. - was redone from scratch. The biggest differences were that one wall was knocked down to create an archway connecting the dining room and the kitchen. This really opens things up. In doing so, we also added a lot of counter space and tons more cabinet space. As part of all this, we got significantly nicer appliances and cabinets. The new countertops are granite and the new floor is slate.
There’s now a lot more room to cook in here, which makes cooking more enjoyable. The project took a lot longer and cost a lot more than originally expected. All told, it took about twice as long and cost about twice as much as what we planned for when we started down this path.
But it’s done now and we love our new kitchen.
Before
First, let’s start with the “before” photos.
Here are a couple shots of Beth and Sybil (our friend who introduced us) working in the kitchen a day or two before our wedding in September 2002. These show all the usable counter space in the old kitchen, which wasn’t much.
The rest of these “before” photos are right before the demolition started. We moved the baker’s racks that we’d been using for extra storage down into the basement, along with all our food and cookware.
The old kitchen had a sliding glass door. The new one has a smaller door, moved to the right.
This shot shows the small opening from the kitchen into the main dining/living room of our house. The wall on the left had no counters or cabinets. It would be torn down.
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See the soffit that comes down in front of the old cupboards? The old lights were recessed into that, but it took away several useable inches of cabinet space.
The old kitchen didn’t have a pantry of any kind and featured the original vinyl flooring.
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After
This photo is looking into the kitchen from the (now wider) entrance from the dining room. On the right is the shelves built into the archway.
In the old kitchen, this angle would have been a blank wall with wallpaper. Now it shows the archway leading into the dining room. The range/oven is there, with downdraft ventilation. There’s lots of counter space on both sides, and cabinets for pots and pans.
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Here I’m standing with my back to the new door. The microwave has its own shelf (we used to have a microwave sitting on a baker’s rack). We also got a much nicer refrigerator with - this is important to me - a crushed ice dispenser in the door. To the left of the fridge are two big cabinets that make up our pantry.
Here’s what it looks like if you stand in the dining room and look through the archway into the kitchen.
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Here’s another view of the kitchen from the dining room. The theory here is that you can cook food in the kitchen and pass it through the big archway to the people eating.
This shot shows how much the project opened up the whole area. From here you can see through the archway into the dining room and through the walkway into the living room. The railings in the background are for the stairs leading upstairs and downstairs.
