Way back in mid-February we started to chip away at some things I was wanting to do to our kitchen to just give it a bit of a refresh. A face-lift, if you will. We had done the counters and floors years and years ago. But the cabinets were original to the house making them almost 30 years old and they were starting to really show it. I had refinished the paint on them years ago but it wasn’t great (I’m a total amateur) and it was to the point where I couldn’t clean the cabinet doors without stripping paint. Plus there were spots the particle board was showing and then splitting and it was just a mess. Luckily our kitchen is tiny and a glorified galley layout, which means it’s a DIY dream. First up was replacing one single cabinet next to the stove. Then the other side. We lived with that while Neil went to Berlin and I decided I loved them and was all in on the whole kitchen. The other side of the kitchen was a bit more of a pickle because it had the sink. We love our butcher block counter tops, but turns out they don’t love water. Being next to the sink was not working any more so we decided to do something crazy. We went to a stone yard, picked out a scrap of quartz and had it cut to spec. Neil cut our counter tops to accommodate our new quartz sink surround and I love it even more than I thought I would.

As you can see we lived in a fair bit of chaos while this was happening but we are no strangers to chaos. Everyone rolled with it and we survived. I’m slowly retraining my family as to where everything lives in the new kitchen cabinets. It’s a work in progress.
Next up was officially moving to completely open shelves. I took the doors off of most of my upper cabinets a few years ago and it was finally time to take down the boxes and add real shelves. Again, we plunged into chaos and got to work. I love how they turned out!

I read all the hot takes on why people hate open shelves in a kitchen and I can see the downsides. I don’t mind a bit of warm clutter and I have enough pretty stuff that styling the shelves was fun. It is more work to keep stuff clean but I’m up for it, especially if it means that I love being in my kitchen 80 bajillion times more than I did before.