The Steen Style

**Update! You can see our new wood floors in this post. I’ve also started re-painting our walls to a very pretty grey color. I’ll post pictures of all of that very soon!**

Well…here are the pictures of our kitchen remodel! We are finally finished with OUR part of the kitchen remodel. Well, I say ‘our’ but really ‘us’ means Conner, me, our families and our contractor – hah! We will be hiring different people to come in hopefully soon and replace the countertops, microwave, oven and sink. It was a chore and a process to get this far but I absolutely LOVE how it has all turned out and am so thrilled with what we have accomplished! We had a lot of help along the way so thank you very much to our families who pitched in and helped when they could. We love you!

Without further ado…here are the before and after pictures! All ‘before’ pictures were taken the night we closed on our house: June 25, 2010.

Looking at the food storage area before we got a new fridge. The microwave needs to go ASAP – it doesn’t have a turntable…I mean really? Half of the food we heat up is still cold in the middle. Hopefully the Christmas bonus fairy is good to us and we get to replace these soon!

And the area after! We purchased a new fridge when we moved in (our old one stayed with the new owners of our old house), painted the cabinets white, installed new hardware and put on new hinges on the cabinet doors. Oh…the stories I could tell you of drilling new holes for the new hinges and hanging 40 cabinets back up…well, that is a post for another day when I have had some wine and don’t mind airing my marriage laundry on such a public forum.🙂

This is looking from our breakfast nook into the main kitchen part. Check out the awesome head-knocker cabinets (as we referred to them with our realtor when looking at this house) and really sweet recessed, fluorescent lighting!

And now!! Our contractor removed the row of cabinets that blocked our view of the backyard, sheet rocked over the recessed lighting, installed canned lighting and light boxes for our new pendants (my birthday present from Conner) that my dad installed for us. Conner’s mom spent several nights with us and quickly became the paint fairy. We would leave for work and come home with more white on the cabinets!

Here is the view into our kitchen prep area. The previous owners installed a really nice range top, so that will be staying. The window looks into our living room and gives me a perfect view of our TV! Our kitchen in our old house was at the back of the house and away from the living room so it is such a nice change to be in the kitchen cooking, but still a part of the action with the rest of the house!

Here is the kitchen after! I love the white and how crisp it looks. I hope to get new back splash at some point and also put dark wood floors down. The brick tile is fine for now but because of the finish on it, the shininess gets nicked up very easily.

Another ‘after’ view of our kitchen. The orange Le Crueset was an anniversary present from Conner last year and provides the perfect pop of orange in our kitchen!

The view from our kitchen, looking into the breakfast nook. The ceiling fan looks okay in the pictures but was actually way too big for the space. The country red and roosters…not really our style and made the room seem a lot smaller. We don’t have the biggest kitchen in the world so we needed to make everything appear larger and brighter.

The breakfast nook after! We purchased a new lantern from Home Depot (dad installed again…yay, dad!) and my mom made us some awesome curtains. I absolutely love the fabric. It is a turquoisey-teal and is a fun yet subtle and classy pattern. Our bar on the left used to be black but I painted it the same gray as our living room walls. I am still deciding whether to paint our kitchen table and chairs or not…hmmmm…

This is standing in the kitchen, looking into the breakfast nook and the utility room. It is very nice to have that door to close the noise off while doing laundry!

The view after! I didn’t think we would originally, but taking down the white wood blinds really helped open up the space! Plus, it provides easier access to look outside. We love our backyard and never want to block off the view. Until the past week, I don’t think we had ever closed the curtains. I do it now because the neighbors directly behind us sit higher than we do and the trees are starting to thin a little and it gets darker a lot earlier so with our lights on, I feel like you can see right into our house. Other than that, the curtains are always as open as they can go!Well, that’s the big reveal!

I hope you enjoyed it as much as we enjoyed the remodel. I love looking at the pictures and seeing what we started with and what we have now. We haven’t started a new project yet but I am starting to get the itch to continue making over the other rooms in the house. Hopefully I’ll have more pictures to show with more updates very soon!!

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