Kitchen Makeover

I love featuring the work of blog readers. In this case it's this completely adorable couple, Andrea and Ben Sturgell from Florida. They redid their kitchen (with my favorite style of white cabinets!) and wrote to tell the story... read on!

I placed the before and after photos together so that you could get a feel for how each area of their kitchen was transformed.

When I (Ben) bought the house a little over a year ago, a couple of the drawer fronts were missing, and of the remaining three drawers in the kitchen, only one of them worked! All along, I thought I would eventually remodel the kitchen, but didn't have a huge budget for it at the time. In the year that followed, I got engaged, and then married, and once my wife was in, she was ready for a new kitchen, with functioning drawers and cabinets (we had a separate room full of wedding gifts we couldn't put away!).

We opted to keep the granite and stainless steel appliances we already had, with a minor adjustment: we got a brand new GE dishwasher from Home Depot (it got great reviews and was on sale).

When redesigning the kitchen, we decided we wanted to go with white cabinets, because our kitchen isn't a huge space, and we felt it would make the space look bigger, and we also, just really liked the look of white cabinets. Our choice of the Shaker style cabinets, was simply a stylistic one, and something we thought would be better long term for re-sale. Before meeting with our cabinet designer, Roland Custom Designs,
we researched tons of storage solution ideas, and thankfully, our cabinet designer was able to incorporate them for us. To name a few, we got two oversized drawers at 36' each, which house 90% of all the pots / pans / Tupperware that took up all of our previous lower cabinets, we got a flip down panel in front of the sink that secretly hides our sponges, the space about the fridge holds every one of our new wedding gift platters, and we have a mini "pull-out pantry" located right next to our dishwasher (it has become the pet food and pet related items storage spot!).

Our cabinet designer was able to get us an amazing price on the handles we loved, he got them for us at cost, approximately 20% of what they would have cost at Home Depot!

We decided on a glass tile backsplash from Home Depot. This was one of our most agonizing decisions, we probably brought home 20 different samples to compare it to the granite and cabinets. Although, we love the backsplash, we thought it might be too busy for the entire kitchen, so we decided to place it just behind the sink. All of our back splash/drywall/disposal install and hole cutting was done by Charlie Evenski, a great handyman, from the West Palm Beach area.

We wanted to reuse our existing granite and having it lifted, polished and cut, was about a quarter of the price of new granite! The granite company, Stone Dynamics in the West Palm Beach area, was able to lift it (with only one tiny crack to a far corner that they were able to repair). They cut nine inches off of one piece, and used this to create an additional counter top space to the right of our stove (we wanted to frame the stove in). They also shortened the counter top near the sink by approximately four inches, to allow us a larger space for a larger fridge in the hopefully near future:). They also were able to make a larger hole for the sink, allowing us to go from a small single sink, to a much larger sink. 

Thank you, Ben and Andrea for sharing your great makeover! I love how you made the cabinets ceiling height and I am in love with your amazing molding! You must be thrilled with how much brighter it makes your kitchen feel!