Kitchen Makeover Before and After

Take a look at this kitchen makeover brought to you by our friend Shelley Smith from TheHouseOfSmiths.com:

Over the past 3 years our home has undergone quite the style change, from darker Tuscan colors to brighter,airier modern cottage hues. We've completely transformed most of the spaces on our main floor, with the exception of the kitchen. So this past summer we took the plunge and started in on a full kitchen restyle as well.

One of the main things that I wanted in my new kitchen was a big, white farmhouse-style sink. We started the project by removing our old sink and counter tops.

Then we found a local cabinet building expert to remove our existing cabinet fixture and revamp it a bit to be able to accommodate the new farmhouse sink.

The cabinet revamping process took a few days so we were stuck with washing dishes in the bathtub down the hall, but it was a small sacrifice to make for our soon-to-be 'new' kitchen!

We've always loved our granite counter tops because they're durable and have a beautiful finish, but knew that we'd need to have a much lighter color than before, to go with all the changes we were making during our restyling process. Luckily we were able to work it out so that our new counter tops were installed just a day or so apart from our new sink This meant that we didn't have to feel like we had a totally unusable kitchen for very long; which is KEY in a kitchen remodel! Nobody wants to be without a sink or counter tops longer than they absolutely have to, right?

The final steps in our kitchen restyle were to paint our existing cabinets and add a subway tile back splash After a lot of searching and color matching we found the perfect paint colors and gray tile for our space. Instead of DIY'ing the cabinet painting process, we decided to hire it out this time around, to make sure we got the best finish possible.

We also had the back splash installed by professionals who did an amazing job laying all those tiny little bricks. Atone point we couldn't decide if we wanted to go with dark or light grout, but after seeing the tiles up, we went ahead and chose Alabaster white for our final grout finish; and love it!

It's amazing what a couple of months,paint, tile and new counter tops can do for a space! It's really opened things up and made our tiny kitchen appear much larger, but more importantly it helps the house flow a lot better now. I can't believe we waited this long to make these simple changes. It was a very low stress restyle and we have been more than thrilled with the new changes.

-Shelley Smith