We’ve been in our home for over 20 years now, and after building a kitchen for my son and his wife, I decided that we’d renovate our kitchen as well. Of course, the renovation spread to incorporate most of the downstairs when all was said and done. Our objectives were: “Fix” the Island, new upper cabinets, new countertop, recessed lighting, new flooring, paint and trim. In the pictures, you can see that the island is a crooked shape and due to it’s shape, wound up being a waste of space and function.
I had tiled the downstairs 15 years before and we needed to get the floor back down to the slab.
Once that was done, I started with the island. There was electrical in the slab to feed the outlets. Since I had pictures of the framing prior to the cabinet install, I knew there was room to work with as we re-positioned the cabinets. I reused the existing cabinets and moved them 16″ toward the kitchen (sill lots of room on both sides) as well as tied them together.
Once the Island was done, we had to decide on countertops – We chose “Ice White” because it was pretty and did not have a ton of heavy “movement” to distract. Besides, it had flecks of “sparkle” for the grand-daughters and hint’s of Purple for the wife. The colors also went with our planned color scheme as well. The cabinets will be White, the walls are “Chocolate Froth” and the flooring will be grey wood-grain LVT. With these colors – this was a logical choice. We also upgraded our sink while we were at it.
We had been talking about what we were going to do with the 1/2 bath that is down stairs. We found a remnant piece of granite for a great price and had it cut to size. We went with a green/rose/bronze theme and decided on a basin sink. my wife found a nice mirror on Marketplace and we repainted the frame and light fixture with a rubbed bronze finish. New upper cabinet and fresh paint all around.
Next up was Lighting. We had decided on Recessed LED Lights. I opted for Lithonia Lighting, color select-able recessed LEDs instead of “wafer” style due to the reduction of glare, since our ceilings were only 8 feet. I needed to layout the placement and ensure good coverage. For this, I marked each rafter with pieces of blue tape on the screws along the length of each rafter. While tedious, it was a great way to see where everything was. USEFUL HACK: I used rare earth magnets to locate the screws, then add a small piece of blue tape. Once I had the layout determined, I mounted the lights with temporary wiring and Command strips to the ceiling to see how it worked in real life. Up next was cutting holes, and installing lights. Since this was a downstairs area, and I did have some construction pictures, I knew I had space to work with.
Once the Lighting was done, it was time to tackle the flooring and upper kitchen cabinets. We removed all upper cabinets and I built new ones to go in their place, only the new ones were taller to close the gap that existed on the old ones. While the spacing was generally tee same, we did decide to use larger doors than were on the old ones, similar to the lowers. All doors were done in Shaker style, primed and painted with white cabinet enamel semi-gloss paint. I knew that we wanted to install under cabinet lighting, and when doing the electrical, made sure that everything was prepped and ready. We chose an LED Strip tape lighting and aluminum channel for housing it in. For the flooring, we used Lifeproof Luxury Vinyl Tile (LVT) flooring in a wood-grain grey that we found at our local Home Depot. We determined the orientation and starting position to minimize “back-fill” and got after it. Once the flooring was done, we then started on replacing door frames and baseboards. Since we were looking for a more modern look, we used pre-primed 1×4’s for the door frames on all doors, and used pre-primed 1×5’s for the baseboards. The beauty of using pre-primed boards, is that they are very uniform and already smooth, making the final paint MUCH easier. All boards were painted with 2x coats for paint before installation, so only caulking, nail filling and touch up was needed. Lastly, we installed the Subway backsplash. Since there was already a lot of white, we chose a silver-grey tint for the grout to tie in the greys of the countertop, island and flooring.