Kitchen Renovation Reveal and Sources

$2500
10 Weeks
Advanced
I am so excited to finally share our completed kitchen renovation! We started this project as part of the six week One Room Challenge (but it took us way longer). We aimed to do everything ourselves which saved a lot of money and we learnt a lot in the process! For more details and all our sources check out our blog post.
Our completely transformed kitchen - we raised the upper cabinets, painted them, added shelves, backsplash tiles and new light fixtures!
The "before" shot - Our dark and very brown builder standard kitchen at the beginning of our One Room Challenge makeover.
Our first step was to take down all the upper cabinets and raise them up to the ceiling. We learnt the hard way (aka after putting them all up and then taking them down again) to use a ledger board for this step to keep all the cabinets level!
Once the cabinets were up Chris tiled the backsplash and the entire wall around the window with these awesome glass subway tiles. He also wired and installed our new light fixtures.
The absolute honest truth about diy kitchen renovations - one morning you will wake up to find the dishwasher in the middle of the floor and your husband curled into a lower corner cabinet trying to fish wires through the wall.
While Chris was tiling and doing all the electrical I was busy painting the cabinet frames in place and spray painting the doors in our driveway (and sometimes spray painting the driveway...and the cars...oops)
With tiling finished we very carefully drilled holes through to the studs to install some open under-cabinet shelves. The shelves were also a diy project made by distressing & staining some rough pine boards from the hardware store.
We also decided not to reinstall one of our cabinets and instead replaced it with floating shelves.
We also bought and painted new cabinets to surround our fridge to which we added a slide out pantry unit.
The completed kitchen with trim and everything!
Another before shot of the fridge area!
And the same area after the renovation!


Thanks for checking out our project!
Casey FitzGerald
Want more details about this and other DIY projects? Check out my blog post!
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3 of 11 questions
  • Cynthia Cynthia on Mar 18, 2016
    What paint color did you use for the lower cabinets? Love it!
  • Maggie   Gallagher Maggie Gallagher on Mar 19, 2016
    Are you all six feet tall in your home? I find the cupboards too high to be useful for me at 5 ft 5 do you keep a stepstool in the kitchen and where do you locate it so as not to be in the way?
  • Kim Kim on May 09, 2016
    Where did you get the slide out pantry next to fridge?
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  • Lisa House Lisa House on May 10, 2016
    Beautiful
  • Joann  Quill Joann Quill on Aug 01, 2016
    That is some great work by you. Must have done a lot of hard work. Recently one of my friend got his kitchen renovated from www.estatecabinetry.com and the end product was too good. He was quite satisfied and said good things about them. They also provided him best offers and was affordable.
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