Remodeling the Kitchen Wall

 Unfortunately, I forgot to take a before picture of the kitchen wall, so I had to go way back into my archives and found this picture of Michael and Josiah. This was the best picture I could find that showed what this wall used to look like. I had a baker's rack up against the wall that held all my cookbooks and such. You can see the ugly hallway, too. See several posts back for its remodel.

Not only did we replace the paneling with drywall, we decided a pass-through would really open things up between the kitchen and dining room. So my handy, dandy man (with his helper) was on the job.

Here are the end results. Can I just tell you how impressed I am with my husband's carpentry skills? He's never done it before and I was amazed at how he put this together. It wasn't easy. He made lots of mistakes along the way, but learned from them. Nothing in our house is square because it is an older house, but he made it work and was able to fix his mistakes. He even made me a 12 inch breakfast bar and put a shelf on top for my cookbooks. We painted this wall in the kitchen and plan on painting the rest of the kitchen at some point. Also, the reason why we didn't put trim up on the ceiling was because eventually we'd like to put a stamped tin ceiling in here with new lighting. I think it will be stunning.

I love that I can now talk to people sitting in the dining room while I'm working in the kitchen. Now I want to paint in here, too.

Here is my carpenter hero! Next, he's going to make me a sturdy bench the same dimensions as the breakfast bar that I can slide under it when the kids aren't using it. I love the idea that as the kids get older and they want to use the Internet, I'll be able to keep an even closer eye on them. This will also help me to see Josiah when he's homeschooling or he can homeschool at the breakfast bar and I can still be in the kitchen working on stuff. Love it!

By doing this ourselves, we saved so much money! We managed to remodel all three walls for under $400 and didn't put a thing on the credit card. It took us three weeks to get this project done, working on the weekends and after Michael got got off work in the evenings. We would stay up late priming or painting walls and then be up at 5am to get another layer on before the kids got up. This is why I've been such a bad blogger lately ;P Glad you all have stuck with me and I appreciate all your sweet comments not only in the blogging world, but on Facebook, too. Love you guys! I thank God for each of you and I'm so glad you're part of my world.

I did some rearranging of some other pieces of furniture in our house, that made a dramatic difference and I hope to post those pics soon.

God Bless,
Jackie