Kitchen Renovation

Well, 10 months after buying our first house....OUR KITCHEN IS FINALLY DONE!! This is the first room in our house that is completely done and we could not be more happy with how it turned out. Not even going to lie, Austin did 99% of the work in the kitchen; my help came more from picking out decor and helping make the decisions. He did an amazing job with everything, I'm so obsessed. Apologizing in advance for the long post!

The first time we looked at the kitchen in this house our brains immediately starting coming up with ideas of everything we wanted to do to it. First things first, we knew we needed to move some things around. The fridge was tucked in the corner by the garage door and covered part of the door, so we decided to move the stove and microwave over to the other wall of the kitchen and move the fridge to the middle of the wall that it was already on (moving the gas line was luckily all we had to hire someone to do, Austin was able to do everything else). With moving the appliances, we had to move/replace a couple of cabinets. Next came painting all of the cabinets white and replacing all of the hardware. 

Since Austin works at a granite shop there was no doubt that we were going to be getting new counter tops. We actually spent a day in Schaumburg at the granite distributors that work with Austin's work to find the perfect slabs for our house. I had in my mind what I wanted, which was more of a standard granite that is in a lot of homes, darker gray and black tones. Austin had white in mind and wanted something unique. I didn't know if I liked the idea of white counters and white cabinets but at the end of the day I let Austin decide and it's absolutely perfect.

There originally was no back splash in the kitchen, so we decided to stick to a simple design and did white subway tile with black grout. We also got rid of the peel and stick tile that was in the kitchen and replaced it with tile that looks like gray hardwood. The last major change we did was the light fixtures. Putting in can lights opened up the room a lot. The last home owners also had a small eating area that had a hanging light fixture and since we knew we just wanted to extend the breakfast bar for seating, we removed that light and added two over the bar instead.

Another small addition that was made was this open shelf, which I think is my favorite part of the kitchen. We placed it over where we keep our Keurig and I'm so excited to have a place to display my flea market coffee and tea jar finds!

Here are some before and afters :) the before photos are the ones from the original house listing, so the quality is a little rough but I forgot to get good ones before we started destroying the place!