We live in an apartment in a building built in 1915. The top used to be one house but it was converted to two one-bedroom units in the late 1970’s, and the finishings in our kitchen probably haven’t changed since then (aside from some painting touch-ups). I think the cabinet hardware was even original!

Slowly over the years we’ve been doing aesthetic touch-ups here and there, but we’ve been avoiding the kitchen because I have a long-term vision of doing a complete gut remodel of it someday, so we thought we could just wait it out (after all, it was ugly, but it’s functional!) Then the pandemic hit, and my husband and I both found ourselves unemployed with a lot of time on our hands (and spending a LOT more time in said gross-yet-functional kitchen). When I say ‘gross’, I mean like, you could clean the counters and the floor and they STILL looked dirty. Who chooses cream tile with brown grout??

BEFORE PHOTOS:

So, it started with the countertops. We had tried out a concrete countertop when we re-did our bathroom years ago, and we still had some of the concrete feather finish material left, so I suggested we test it out over the tile to see if it would work. AND IT DID! After a few coats it covered the tile beauuuuutifully, and I was officially obsessed. We also put a new bead of caulk around the sink which was probably the easiest change we did that made SUCH a big difference.

And the new countertop coating made the not-white cabinets look even more not-white, so I decided we had to paint the cabinets. And then of course we needed new cabinet hardware, for a LOT of cabinets. Miraculously, our friends had recently purchased new cabinet pulls for their kitchen and they had almost the EXACT same number of cabinets. They offered to give us their old pulls (which were much newer than our old pulls). Thanks Hannah & Max!

And then, of course, once we did the cabinets we had to do the floor. Again, the long-term plan for this space is to gut it, so we didn’t want to start pulling the linoleum up because that just seemed like opening a can of worms. I thought about painting the linoleum but that seemed hard (and I’m not sure we could have kept our cats off of it while it dried). The genius solution was peel-and-stick floor tiles! We found a pattern we liked that was available to order online with free shipping. Voilà!

Our fridge also conveniently started leaking (both our fridge and oven were very old) so we decided to purchase the appliances we wanted for our final space. Something about doing all of this work and then still having a gross old oven seemed super unfulfilling. Thank you 6 months interest-free financing!

The issue was: our kitchen has this strange half-wall that envelops the fridge, which is apartment-size. We discovered that any normal-sized fridge (I really wanted a side-by-side) was way wider than that space, by exactly the width of the strange half-wall. Solution? Remove the side wall, obvi! John was very excited to use his power tools to saw it in half.

The wall was hollow (whyyyy???) so we mounted a piece of moulding to the front to hide it. With a little paint you can’t even tell! The floor also had a hole in it, so we filled it with wood and planned for the floor tiles to go over it (remember, not our final kitchen!). When the fridge arrived we realized our front door was also not wide enough - so we crow-barred off part of the door frame. There was no way we weren’t getting that fridge into our house!

Most of this happened last summer, and the final step was replacing the cream baseboards (which we opted to remove to install the peel-and-stick tile) with white. Well, it took us about 8 months to finally get around to finishing that, but we finally did it this past month!

Obviously this isn’t our final kitchen (which we jokingly refer to as the “Barbie Dream Kitchen”) but boy oh boy do I love being in this space now. It is an absolute joy to do dishes while staring at our new countertops. And we’re completely obsessed with our double convection oven.