Our Kitchen Reno

It took more than six months. Six long months... Microwave meals and doing dishes in the bath tub. Thank goodness it was all worth it! It hard to look at the before pictures and think about how gross the kitchen was. We knew it was bad, but when you live in something and see it everyday it tends to not be quite so bad. Looking back I don't know how anyone stepped foot in our kitchen. When we started our kitchen reno we had no money.. All we had to put into our kitchen was thought and time. We began by tearing down the plaster. It was messy and took forever. Bit by bit it came down until we got down to just the lath under the plaster. Once all the plaster was downTaler and my dad sheetrocked the kitchen.The old plaster had been patched and duck taped so many times, it was in need of a lot of help. Then we focused on ripping up the old linoleum.   Little did we know that we would have to go through 4 layers of flooring just to find the original wood sub floor. Once we got to the wood, however, we discovered that the floor had this black tarry goo all over it. Once again, not having any money, only time, Taler purchased a wall paper steamer and went to work. It was basically an 8x12 square that had to be set on the floor for a minute or so and then he had to scrape the floor by hand. Yes, one square at a time. It took forever... Once the black goo was gone we were able to properly sand the floors with a rented sander. Now on to the cabinets. We wanted to reuse as much as the cabinetry that we could. They were original to the house and basically needed a new coat of paint. But, the cabinets had so many doors, it made the kitchen too busy. We decided to have new custom cabinet doors made and combined some of the doors to make longer doors to help streamline the kitchen. We also had decided to reconfigure the kitchen some to give us more counter top surface area. We moved the fridge to the back wall and put the oven on the same wall. We had two new custom cabinets built to go on each side of the stove. The kitchen had an old metal sink cabinet in it that we had planned on reusing, but it was not able to be re-powdercoated, so we had to buy another cabinet. Thankfully we had showed at the Buffalo Horse Show enough times that night to pay for our sink cabinet so we didn't have to come up with that money. When it came time for counter tops we knew that our foundation had been built with a material called Phenix Marble. We knew that they made counter tops and the stone was quarried just a few miles from the house. It only seemed appropriate that we incorporate this into the kitchen. It also just so happened that the stone is the perfect shade of creamy gray that we were looking for. We went and picked out our slab. Since we measured and installed the counter tops ourselves that saved us and additional $500. Our plan was to get the old cast iron sink recoated also, but after talking to an expert he couldn't guarantee that it was last so we decided to reinstall the sink just the way it was. Patina and all, it's still so big and beautiful. We ordered out faucet from Amazon and added a built in soap dispenser for the sink. For our hood over the stove we bought a less expensive vent less hood and then trimmed it out in barn wood from an old board that we found in our attic. I wanted the long black handles for the cabinets and we were able to order those from Amazon. We went with classic subway tile as a back splash. It was a cost effective tile to buy and is so popular right now. I love the clean straight lines it gives. We picked a grout color that was similar to the grey in the counter tops. We still want to do some exposed shelving in the kitchen, but for now it is totally functional and we are so grateful to have a dishwasher and to not eat microwave meals anymore. 

Source List

Counter tops: Phenix Marble Company-Color: Napoleon Grey http://www.phenixmarble.com/ We measured and installed them ourselves and saved $500. 

Cabinets: Signature Woodworks https://www.signaturewoodworksco.com/ We bought our cabinets and doors unfinished and that saved us money. We painted and stained them ourselves. 

Faucet and Door Pulls: Amazon https://www.amazon.com/dp/B011779BCC/ref=sxr_rr_xsim_3?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_p=3008523062&pd_rd_wg=DdO1n&pf_rd_r=6JKK15PRP4J33K114R32&pf_rd_s=desktop-rhs-carousels&pf_rd_t=301&pd_rd_i=B011779BCC&pd_rd_w=fdL8c&pf_rd_i=black+kitchen+faucet&pd_rd_r=d5295ee5-ba69-11e7-bad0-2f32181b20b3&ie=UTF8&qid=1509034936&sr=3

Appliances are all from Sears. They are a pain to work with, but we like the appliances. 

We rented the floor sander from Home Depot and then stained the floor with Special Walnut stain from Lowes.