Claire's Table

As I sit here today to write this, it has been almost a year since we realized we were going to have to rip out our entire kitchen, and plan for a renovation. A saga, with a great ending!

Now that the kitchen renovation is over, it turned out pretty incredible! However, it didn’t start with sweet beginnings- hence the bleak tone of my opening sentence! We did not plan for the kitchen renovation. Of course, we have always dreamt about refinishing the dusty gray cabinets, rearranging some of the cabinets into drawers, take off the weird wooden paneling on the soffit. But did I expect we would be ordering a dumpster, mudding drywall, buying 29,398 new tools, or busting up the tile floors with a small jackhammer? No. Of course not.

This is our first home, and we purchased back in March 2021. We did a solid amount of painting here and there, and Austin, my husband, took on a few woodworking projects. But as for major renovation plans, we were not committed to any yet. We were so new to owning a home, it took us like a year to replace a cracked window. So when we started to notice a leak in the kitchen, we stalled for a little while trying to figure out what to do.

The leak was so weird. Two out of five times that it rained, water would come into the kitchen THROUGH the door trim. As the issue progressed, it started coming through a light fixture. Then after the rain water damaged the back of our cabinets pretty bad, the water came dripping out of the front of the cabinet. It was seriously the weirdest thing.

So we had the roof fixed, a good first step!

Then it was time to tear up the insides and see what was going on. I remember, I was at my friend’s bachelorette party (out of town) when the water remediation company called me. They asked if they could come in 20 minutes to start tearing out the kitchen. When I asked them when they would be ready to schedule the repairs, they told me 8 weeks (!!!). It was clear we need to get our ducks in a row before doing this, otherwise no sink, no walls, no dishwasher, potentially no oven for 8 weeks, and in the middle of the summer.

It started to get scary! Realizing we didn’t feel very prepared to take on such a major inconvenience with basically no progress for 2 months. Not to mention, the time it would take for the reassembly of a dated and sub-par version of the space we use the most in the house. Another scary: none of this had been planned for. There were no thoughts, designs, mood boards, colors, pinterest pins, nothing, had been put towards a full kitchen renovation that would include reworking the entire space. And then finding the money to do it.

I don’t know what made us finally decide to go for it. Part of it was the unknown of the kind of repairs we’d need, with no way to know what needed to be fixed until the kitchen was ripped open. Part of it was also realizing it was necessary. Plus, we love spending time in the kitchen, so this would be our chance to change it up.

Demo started.

And they were done by the end of the day. The damage wasn’t bad internally. But here we have un-insulated walls, no countertop, no sink, no dishwasher, and part of the tile flooring chipped away. Thank goodness for the limited internal damage we didn’t need to deal with, but it was time to mobilize and decide what the heck we were going to do.

At the minimum, we definitely needed new backsplash, a few cabinets, and- since we weren’t sure how you repair partially chiseled away floors- new floors. Plus the drywall, insulation, electrical, etc. The list felt like it tapped every part of the room… so why not take the opportunity to make this kitchen our own? Design it a little more to our style, and eliminate some of the problematic kitchen design issues it had.

And so we did.

Follow along with this series as I share more about our experience renovating our entire kitchen- ourselves! I am excited to share this, as it was a major labor of love. It turned out to be so good. You won’t be able to wait to see the reveal- and what it took to get there!