Official Kitchen Before and After (unofficially)

Hi Everyone!

Happy Tuesday! Today is a very special day for me.  First, its the first time AHFOC has been featured by a fellow blogger.  The beautiful Ms. Kristin of Bliss at Home is featuring me in her Great Reads series.  I'm so honored and super psyched about it.  Thank you, Kristin.  If you are joining me today for the first time from Bliss at Home, id like to say WELCOME!!  I hope you stay a while and come back again soon.

Second, I'm so excited to finally be revealing the official before and after of our kitchen makeover. I added in "unofficially" because there are still a  few more things we have to do before I'm content with calling this space completely done. Ive received some questions and comments about the space recently so I wanted to dedicate a post to sharing the details of the makeover, so, tada:

We began our kitchen revamp over a year ago, guys. Yep, that's right! It took us a whole year to get to the point where we are today. And though I would have LOVED to have completed this project in much, much, MUCH less time than it actually took, Ive gotta keep it real with you guys.

Design details and decisions don't happen quickly in this house. Naomi and I are complete opposites when it comes to our vision of pretty much everything, so the process required A LOT of compromise with a side of patience. In addition, we both work full time and we restricted ourselves to a very strict budget. We didn't have a ton of availability to tackle things all at once so we focused on things in phases, which meant sometimes months would go by without any progress. We solicited various sources for things and tried our hardest to take advantage of sales and coupons when at all possible, which meant patience was key. Take our back splash tile, for instance. We didn't actually purchase it until months after we first found it and that was almost a year after the cabinets had been painted!

In the end this is a space we are both just so proud of.  Our new kitchen is very much a reflection of both of us. We were able to do everything ourselves and came in under $700!  The motto for this project was "work with what cha got", so we only made cosmetic changes to the space and used the existing floor plan and appliances. We just love it and I hope you enjoy it as well.

This is what the space looked like on the day we walked through the house for the very first time, prior to us even putting in an offer!

The style just wasn't us at all.  It felt like the same kitchen I would see in every other house in our neighborhood. I'm happy to say that today we have a kitchen that is very much us:

 

 

 

 

 

Simple changes like painting our cabinets (you can read about that fiasco here, here, and here), creating some open shelving, adding hardware (found at Ikea), replacing the faucet, and adding a back splash makes the kitchen look and feel completely different! 

 

We still have to replace the flooring and tackle the dining area within the space, but the changes we've made so far definitely make it my favorite room in the house!  I just hope it doesn't take us another year to get that part done. Eh, who am I kidding!

 

Until next time...



XoXo-Shavonda

Linking up here, and here

***After I published this post it dawned on me that some of you might want color details, DUH SHAVONDA.  Pardon my rudeness.  The colors are Glidden Rich Navy on the walls, Ben Moore Simply White (Aura) on upper cabinets, and Ben Moore Anchor Gray (Advance) on the lower cabinets and island.****