The Big Reveal

I know you've been waiting with baited breath for these pictures. Right?

It's not totally complete yet - but it's almost there. I have been waiting patiently for the kitchen to be clean and put back together to get pictures.

Let's look at the before kitchen one more time. Notice the empty wall and the awkwardly placed island. The black range which opened right up to the only real prep space in the kitchen. Lastly - note the old floors.



After a couple of months of very hard work, here we are today:


We removed the awkward island, turned it to face the family room, and made it bigger. We also added more cabinets along the empty wall for more storage. Changing the island also gave us a good place for a little bar/sitting area. Our friends come over and have a perfect spot to sit and chat with us while we finish up cooking.

With all of that cooking going on, we decided to get a single bowl, deep sink. It's been a dream so far - no complaints. Oh - and double ovens. So awesome. We had multiple people say that we'd only ever use the double oven a few times per year. We've had them installed for 2 months and we've used both at the same time at least 3 or 4 times. Not on purpose either.

Since there was a fair amount of rearranging going on, we also got new counter tops. Choosing a counter top type and then choosing a color was probably the hardest part of this whole ordeal. We knew we wanted a solid surface counter so we could have an undermount sink. That's about as far as our "needs" list went. Originally we looked at granite but just couldn't decide on a color. Plus there was the concern of having several different slabs in the kitchen and it not be cohesive. After a lot of trips to different stores/shops we finally landed on Silestone as the material. It wasn't a hard sell to get the color, which is Bamboo. This is one of the items in the kitchen that I just held my breath and said "Let's go for it." not totally sure how it would turn out.

So, what do you think? Love it or hate it?