Honey, I Broke the Kitchen

Oh friends, what have I done?

Last Friday I had the day off from work and I had an impulse to start tearing my kitchen to shreds. This is probably the sort of thing I should have discussed with my dear husband, but somehow I thought he'd be excited forgiving when he saw what I'd done. When he came home from work that day, he quietly surveyed my destruction and said "I guess we'll be building a kitchen this weekend."

He was right.

Let me back up. Our kitchen is small, sure, but it isn't awful by any stretch. So while there are things I wouldn't have chosen (tiled countertops with impossible-to-clean grout, I'm looking at you), B and I were to content to live with it, as is, since we bought the house in 2010.

When we moved in, we bought a stainless fridge even though the dishwasher was black and the stove was white. It really didn't bother me and we justified it by assuming we'd have to replace the dishwasher at some point since it was going to die since it was a much older model than the other appliances.

Well, in November of 2012 (yes, eight months ago!), that happened. One day, the dishwasher stopped working. And while we could have had someone repair it, we were ready to bid adieu to it. And we splurged on a new stainless model.

But when we scheduled the removal of the old one and the replacement of the new one, we learned that it wasn't going to be quite so simple. The previous owners had installed the floor tiles in front of the old dishwasher and it wasn't going to come out quite as easily as we had hoped. Or really, at all.

Folks, please consider this if you're redoing your floors: Pull the dishwasher out and extend the flooring under it. Seriously. If it doesn't come back to bite you in the butt, it will be a headache for the next owners of your home.

So, much the way pretty much all projects in our home go, we then waited while we fretted/avoided/overanalyzed our predicament.

After much discussion, we decided maybe it was time to look at replacing the countertops we weren't so in love with anyway.

I filled my Pinterest "kitchen" board full of dream remodels. I was pretty sure I had to have marble. We got estimates and it sounded pretty good. Then I got scared by the horror stories of marble maintenance. We looked at other stone and manmade surfaces and didn't see anything quite as beautiful.

And then we started toying with the idea of butcher block counters. And that started sounding pretty good. So of course I started pinning kitchens with those! So soon we had it pretty worked out that we wanted new counters, a new sink and faucet, a new dishwasher (which was waiting anxiously to be installed), and maybe some fresh non Band-Aid colored paint. We had a plan. And then we waited.

And waited some more.

We discussed the pros and cons of hiring someone to do this work. Actually, we pretty much decided this was more than we could take on ourselves, but we talked to 3 different contractors about helping us with this project and all of them stopped responding when we said we'd like to schedule the work.

And then we waited some more.

Aaaaand now here we are, 8 months after our dishwasher broke, finally making progress on our kitchen!

Yeah!

(I really wasn't joking about our snail's pace.)

Can't wait to show you the progress we've made!