Kitchen Before

Good morning, darling friends! 🙂

This weekend, I was able to paint the kitchen with the help of my sister’s boyfriend, Shawn, and my mom for watching Bruce. I’m boxing everything up in the kitchen, pantry, and dining room today and bathroom renovations upstairs will be going on so it’s a very busy week. Wish me luck I make it through! 😉

Since posting my condo updates, I’ve been asked to share before photos and here they are! It was definitely time for an upgrade! Without going deep into personal matters, we moved into this condo in February of 2012 because it became our responsibility. You might have some questions regarding who, how, or why but that’s as far as I’ll share. 😉 Since we were planning to live here for a long time, we needed to give this place a LOT of love.

The first thing we tackled before moving in were the floors. You can see the old kitchen floors in the photo above. It just wasn’t our cup of tea. 😉 So we put in beautiful wood laminate floors on the bottom floor and carpet upstairs. (I’ll share before and afters of those another day.) You can kind of see a glimpse of the new floors on the first photo and the one below.

The kitchen tiles were broken, chipped, stained, or barely holding on with glue.

Everything in the condo was unfinished or in awful shape. Painter’s tape was still everywhere! Not to mention an awful paint job.

The sink was disgusting. I scrubbed and bleached without much improvement.

Under the sink, the bottom of the cabinet was sunken in. They were covered by a piece of wood for a temporary fix but those didn’t stay level either.

So when I first walked into the kitchen, I was totally discouraged from all the things that needed updates.

But after having beautiful new cabinets installed, I was starting to feel hopeful. 🙂

This is the state it was in once my contractor put in our backsplash last week. Are you ready for the after?! 😉 You’ll have to wait until next week since I need to finish packing.

Things to note: Since we’ll be renting this place out within the next few weeks, we’ve decided to not worry about the lighting above or updating the electrical outlets. It’s something we’d definitely look into updating if we ever move back in. 🙂

Have you started or been renovating your kitchen or your house for a long time? Our kitchen ended up taking forever for many reasons but I’m so happy I can finally cross off a huge part of my to-do list!

Lots of Smiles,
Akiyo