Our kitchen remodel is done! It’s been such a crazy and fun learning experience for me. This was the first kitchen I’ve even designed from scratch and now that I’m on the other end I can’t wait to share with you all that I’ve learned. I’m sitting in my little home office (technically our dining room) as I type this and the kitchen is just to my right. I can turn my head and see the cement tile flooring, the reclaimed wooden open shelving, the copper accents and I just can’t stop smiling. The kitchen surpassed all of my expectations in function and form. Being in it, cooking in it, and even just staring at it makes me unreasonably happy.
I’m excited to spend this whole week sharing the whole process of the kitchen remodel with you guys. I took so many photos and learned so much along the way, that instead of doing one stupid long post and trying to cram everything into to one big-ass reveal, I thought I’d parse it out in more bite-sized pieces. So this whole week on the blog will be dedicated to bohemian kitchens, our bohemian kitchen and the remodel so that you all may share in on the process, from inspiration to budgeting, planning, layout, accessorizing. I am basically creating the posts that I would have like to have read before embarking on this mission myself. So here goes. Today I’m gonna talk about budgeting and layout.
Before I get too deep into discussing budgeting, however, I’d like to put a few things out there. Being a design blogger definitely has its perks–and having the opportunity to work with brands and get free stuff is pretty high up on that perk list. Before embarking on this remodel, I approached some of my favorite brands to help out…and some of them actually said yes. (I LOVE YOU LOWE’S!!) Sooo, our overall budget for the remodel was 32K but had we not received the sponsored goods, the actual cost would have been closer to 42K. (no joke!!) When discussing budgeting and costs over the course of the week, I will use the actual costs, so that things don’t seem cheaper than they actually were, and anything that I got a sponsored will be clearly marked as such. So now that we got that outta the way, let’s talk about mah GORGEOUS kitchen!
Here’s the before:
The kitchen was a very small galley kitchen with laminate flooring, faux pretty much everything, that brown tile (oy), and, the worst part, a ‘laundry room’ right in the middle of the space. From the second we saw this house and decided to put in an offer, we knew that the laundry room situation had to be the first to go.
What I didn’t know was how much that would cost. You see those pipes going up the wall? Yeah, I had a feeling that was bad news. It wasn’t just a wall we wanted to knock down, but a wall with gas, power and water lines. Yeeks. I also knew that this kitchen project was way above my pay grade so we decided to hire a contractor to guide us through the process.
We met our contractor last year. I was being crazy and I interviewed a handful of contractors to see about knocking down a wall in my rental kitchen. I even wrote a blog post about it here. Of the four contractors that we met with, instead of giving us a bid to redo our rental, our contractor looked us in the eye and said. “Don’t do this. Don’t spend your hard-earned money on a rental. Buy a place, It doesn’t matter how small. Just buy a place and when you do, call me.” Six months later they got the call.
I had done a bit of research and had read that a total kitchen remodel should cost between 5%-15% of the home’s total value. We bought our home for $587,000 (read about it here) so according to that figure our total kitchen remodel should cost around $58,000. YIKES. We definitely couldn’t afford that, so we met with our contractor and made a plan that we could afford.
Here was the plan:
So apparently there is some kind of golden triangle when it comes to kitchen design–you can read about it here but the gist is that there should be a ‘work triangle’ between the sink, the refrigerator and the stove to create a kitchen that functions well. This layout fit that concept perfectly. So here were our ideas:
-The open shelving up top would save us money on cabinets–which are pricey (plus we love the look).
-We’d keep the sink on the back wall so that we didn’t have to move the water lines.
-We’d demo the laundry room, currently in the center of the space, and move the washer and dryer to the garage.
-We’d create a pony wall and make a breakfast bar on the peninsula between the kitchen and the living room.
-We’d move the refrigerator from the corner near the living room to the side and put the range in the peninsula, and add in a Kitchen Work Triangle.
-We’d add a window on the wall above the sink (window not pictured because we added that on later).
He quoted us 28K for the whole project and said unless we added extra stuff on, the price would stay there. (This also included some electrical work and refinishing floors in the living room, den and dining room). We were to provide the tile, the wood, the countertops and the appliances. His team would take care of the rest. We salvaged the existing dishwasher and sold the other appliances, and the very next day our kitchen looked like this:
It was exhilarating and pretty nerve wracking too. Then here we were a few days after that, when the wall dividing the living room and the kitchen came down. I was REALLY glad we weren’t living here yet while all of this was going down.
And then once the whole space was empty, we could start the fun part…putting it all back together… Which we will discuss more mañana :D
Please let me know if you have any questions!! Also, all week on the Jungalow Instagram we will be gramming boho kitchens and kitchen inspo so be sure to follow along.
Sources:
To get everything you could possibly need for your kitchen remodel, go to Lowe’s.
For tiles, accessories, and everything else we used, check out this post.
Top Photo by Danae Horst for the Jungalow
#JungalowByTheRiver kitchen remodel created in partnership with Lowe’s