Kitchen Progress

We've seen the dining room side of the dining room/kitchen renovation. Now, it's time for the overlooked kitchen side. But first, it occurred to me that a lot of my decisions lately have been made because of finances. As in, there are none! I'm not the best at planning and budgeting for these types of projects. Mostly because once I start the reno ball rolling, I can just go and go and don't stop until I run out of money. Good strategy huh?

So, I've decided to lay it all out there and document the costs of the project so far.

Construction, electrical, plumbing -- $6,500

New stove, dishwasher & microwave -- $1,600

Island cabinets from IKEA -- $560

Paint & supplies -- $70 (plus some supplies I already had on hand)

GRAND TOTAL:  $8,730

Balance remaining: $0

However, there is still work remaining to be done. While I was up north with the kiddos, Freckle Man was busy tackling a bunch of jobs in the kitchen that are small changes but still have a big impact. Remember this sad wall and how much the phone drove me bonkers?

We hung this still-life over the big phone jack plate thingy. That's the technical term for it. My grandmother painted this piece in 1952 and although it's hard to see in this horrendous pic, the silver pitcher has amazing details of reflections. I have plans to paint it's frame black to match the little shelf we picked up at IKEA.

Then, this little piece of wall that housed the trash can (which will move to an island cabinet)...

...was transformed to this!

I picked up the big whiteboard at Target for $15 and we already had the meal planner and file storage, also from Target. The white shelf is actually a bathroom shelf but it fit just right for this space. I want to put some practical decorative accessories on the top but for now I just have this guy that was, again, my grandmother's:

Ok, so then there's the kitchen island still to go. Since funds were scarce, we went to IKEA and picked up the two cabinets we'll need for the job. We had IKEA cabinets for the peninsula in our old house and were quite happy with them so I'm fine with going that route again. Freckle Man has assembled the basic shell and now we're just waiting for my favorite carpenter extraordinaire (my brother-in-law) to have a few extra hours to come install the buggers. Like screw them to the floor. Permanent.


But for now, here's what we've got hanging out in the garage:

Ok, so it's a little hard to get excited about the island cabinets until they're actually put in to the kitchen. I'll try to be patient. Now for the island countertop, the plan is for a slab of black matte granite. The cabinets are a very close match to our existing ones, but we don't want to try to match the rest of the granite counter, which has a lot of copper tones.

Given that we're out of mulah at this point, I'm looking into cheap DIY wood options just so we can slap a temporary solution on there and make the island usable in the meantime. I came across this cool project: 
http://cleverlyinspired.com/2012/02/10-diy-wood-countertop-2/
Or maybe I'll just get a 4x4 piece of plywood, paint it black, polyurethane, and slap it up there. So add that to the to-do list as well.


Once we've been able to save up a few pennies, we'll finish the kitchen upgrade with the last pieces:
French door refrigerator -- $2,000
Granite counter -- ?? (need to get some estimates)
Lighting -- Stay tuned! I've got some ideas that are coming up next.