Kitchen Renovation With Built-in Banquette Seating

Kitchen Renovation 

With Built-in Banquette Seating

contributed by Grey Dog Designs

Let me begin with a brief synopsis about our house...  

What is now "our house" started out as Bryan's house...a single man buying his first home.  The items that a women might have as a requirement while house hunting or put on her "non negotiable" list…well they just never cross a man's mind.  As long as it has 4 walls, a roof and a yard to get dirty in, it's good enough for my man!  Needless to say the house needed a bit of TLC.  Lucky for me, I LOVE home renovations!!  Hubby does NOT love home renovations, but he tolerates it because he knows it makes me happy.  

True love I tell ya!

Here's a brief recap of a few small projects that have been tackled since moving in:

- Every wall in the house has been sanded and painted since they were all covered with high gloss paint...

yes, EVERY - SINGLE - WALL

- The ceilings were all scraped and smoothed to get rid of the popcorn

- Every closet door had a 70's accordion door which has been replaced with a regular door

- The dark wood mouldings throughout the house were all painted a nice clean shade of off-white.  This really helped lighten up the entire house since it's a bit smaller and doesn't get much natural light.

Now we move onto the bigger projects!  I figured I would start with the kitchen.

The kitchen has been a work in progress for a few months and we’re finally nearing the end!  (Or at least as far as we are going to go with the kitchen)  Here are a few pictures of what the kitchen looked like on move in day...

(sorry the quality isn't great...Bryan took most of the before pics)

 

 Kitchen sink area

 

Previous homeowner’s idea of a pantry

More ingenious storage ideas!  That’s a curtain covering the cabinets below, and not too sure about the S hooks above.

Dark Cabinets and OLD appliances
And Grey Dog as just a tiny puppy!!!

Our (very dusty) seating

The first thing we did is PAINT...and then painted some more.  The walls got a fresh coat of light green paint and we had the cabinets painted with a Benjamin Moore cream color.  We replaced the old appliances with shiny new stainless steel.  We also had our good friend Will, aka my carpenter, come in and do some fantastic built-in's for more storage and seating and to also close off the exposed cabinets!

 
Pretty painted cabinets with new shelves and appliances

So fresh and so clean!!

 
Good bye random hooks, hello pretty (and functional) shelves

 

We kept the counter tops because they were fairly new and in good condition.

My favorite part might be our built in bench seating with storage underneath!  The small cabinet to the right we use for pantry items and the shelves will be great for more storage.

I also adore our new table we picked up from World Market and my cute little bench I purchased from Craigslist for just $25!  I painted it to match the color of the cabinets and it works great!

 

The next step in the kitchen remodel was to tackle the floor!!  In case you didn't notice in previous pictures, it was a hideous peel and stick vinyl that was not put down even and peeling up in multiple places.  

It had to go!  

We decided to go with tile since the rest of the house has a laminate wood floor that we don't want to replace, and we don't have any matching floor left to finish the kitchen.  The first thing was to pull out the old floor...what we discovered was 4 LAYERS of old vinyl flooring!!!

I picked out a porcelain slate inspired tile I thought would go nicely with the stainless steel and the brown tones would compliment the wood floor.

Here we are in progress, before the grout.

In case you're wondering my living room turned into the storage room!

And here it is after the grout was added.  Grey Dog and I are admiring the finished work...and realizing that the green walls now bring out a green color in my slate tile!   UGH!!!

 Here's Bryan noticing the green as well...

Grey Dog didn't mind, he and his beaver seemed to enjoy the new tile!

Overall I really like the way it looks!  I think it makes the kitchen look MUCH cleaner and it transitions very well from the living room.  The green is a bit overwhelming however, so I think I need to paint the walls.  I'm leaning towards a light grey to try and bring out more of a grey tone rather than a green tone from the tile.  I'm open to ideas though!!

We still have a bit of work to do, but boy have we come a long way!!  I hope to soon have a finished product soon, so stay tuned!!