We’ve come so far with the Main House Fixer Upper remodel here at One Hundred Acres Home. I recently finished the bathroom, totally modernized the wood stove area, and replaced all the floors with 3/4 inch hickory. Now I’m finally ready for the most exiting and challenging project yet: a full kitchen remodel! This post will show you the kitchen “before” plus the kitchen demolition and my remodel planning.
Kitchen Before:
Here are some photos I snapped of the kitchen during our walk-through before we purchased the house. You can see it was packed with stuff and dirty.
There is a certain early 80’s, late 70’s charm but it was tough to feel the charm beyond all the junk.
One we’d closed on the house and moved into the Front Cabin, I cleaned up the kitchen. Here it is all sparkly. I wanted to see, once it was all cleaned up, if it was worth salvaging. While it is kind of cute, the cabinets had too much water damage and general wear over the years. Plus, they held a deep funk, like a weird mix of cigarette smoke and soap. So this kitchen has got to go!
DIY Kitchen Demo:
As you can see, this is relatively small kitchen. My husband and I had never done a kitchen demolition before. But we were feeling adventurous. Plus doing your own demo can save a lot of cash. So we grabbed some long crow bars, put on some safety glasses and gloves, and got to work.
Here is the a progress photo of the DIY kitchen demo. Remember to turn off utilities such as electricity and water. You can see my husband under the sink in the photo below detaching the kitchen sink water supply and plumbing.
We got the bottom cabinets out of the way and into the yard, classy I know. They were too far gone to salvage, but if your cabinets are still in good shape, you can often post them on Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist for a small price or free to get them out of the way and save them from the dump.
Next, it was time to take the upper cabinets down. I poked around and saw that whole cabinet set along the long wall was connected together. I couldn’t find wall screws to unscrew and finally saw that just a few nails were holding this whole thing up. Scary I know!
My husband decided he could take this whole thing down easy. So I took a video him vs the upper cabinets. Hope you enjoy it but don’t try this at home!
Here is the DIY demo kitchen! Well, the flooring got pulled up and replaced after this photo, but at least now we have room to think. Getting the old cabinets out of the space really helped clear my mind and gave me a clean slate to start brainstorming for the new kitchen.
Kitchen Remodel Planning:
When I first start planning a new project, I like to go on Pinterest to get some general design ideas and themes. The overall theme of this kitchen remodel is modern classic to flow with the rest of the house. But I want to give credit where credit is due. I found an amazing IKEA kitchen remodel on Pinterest and followed it to a blog named Chris Loves Julia. Their design heavily influenced the look of this kitchen remodel. It also gave me more faith in trying a DIY IKEA kitchen. I LOVE the modern classic look of black cabinets with brass hardware and a white countertop. SWOON.
Anyway, so once I had the general look of the kitchen figured out, I stood in the space and thought about work flow, storage, and use. It also made most financial sense to keep the oven and kitchen sink in the same place to avoid building permits for changing utilities around. Thinking about storage and use helped me figure out what kinds of cabinets and drawers I would want.
Next, I move to hand sketches to get my ideas on paper. Here are my modern classic kitchen remodel sketches. I want to break up the heavy black on the upper cabinets by adding glass door cabinets on either side of the microware. I also want open shelving on the kitchen sink wall to keep the design from getting to heavy.
IKEA has a kitchen planning tool available on their website where you can select cabinets, finishes, and accessories. Here is a screen shot of my IKEA kitchen planning using the IKEA Lerhyttan black kitchen cabinet series. You can see that instead of the countertop seating, I am experimenting with a stand-alone island, also from IKEA. This creates better flow in and around the kitchen.
However, The IKEA planning seemed a little finicky. I wanted to make sure the dimensions of everything lined up so I used a drafting program called AutoCAD LT to draft the kitchen remodel to scale. AutoCAD does have a bit of a learning curve but has come in very handy for all these remodel projects. They do give you a 30 day free trial if you want to check it out.
Here is my drafted kitchen stove wall. The black cabinets don’t show up very wall on screen but you can really see where I am adding light with the white subway tile backsplash – to match the bathroom and the wood stove tile surround, and in the upper glass cabinets.
These are more screen shots of the kitchen drafting. I even went so far as to draft out options using Home Depot cabinets instead of IKEA just to see if the layout was better. In the end, IKEA’s options for cabinets including pull out drawers, concealed drawers, glass doors, and cabinet lighting was FAR more impressive than any box store I found. Plus I really like how DIY friendly the IKEA kitchen design is.
So, I finalized the layout in the IKEA kitchen planner as best I could and then scheduled an online Zoom meeting with an IKEA kitchen consultant. You can opt to meet in person as well. I had a few questions for the consultant to solve some tricky areas in this small kitchen, mostly that I wanted a deep upper cabinet space next to the open shelving. I wasn’t sure how I’d get that to work. They knew exactly what to do (more on that in the following posts).
After we’d worked out all the kinks, the consultant combed through the kitchen list to make sure I had matching toe kicks, cabinet trim, finish panels, doors, and cabinet lighting. And then we placed the kitchen order! That day just happened to be my birthday, and it felt like the best birthday present I could give myself. Not going to lie, I am nervous to build it, but also so freaking excited. The picture in my head looks really cool. Stay tuned.
