We Remodeled Our Kitchen!

We did it! We remodeled our kitchen! For those of you following our home journey, you'll know that we are in an old house with an extremely outdated kitchen. Our home was built in 1960, and the only change done to it before we moved in was that the built-in oven was removed in favor of an electric range and the top of the cabinets were boxed in.

BEFORE

(My mother-in-law helping paint our kitchen, the cabinets before we painted them inside and out white, our temporary stick-on-tile to cover the solid laminate sheet backsplash)

We did our best to make do with it when we first bought it. We painted the cabinets white on top and a very pale gray on the bottom. Since the hardware had recently been updated and were in great condition, we couldn't justify replacing them just yet. But the plyboard in the make-shift pantry was bowing under pressure, and the top cabinets weren't deep enough for today's dinner plate sizes. We also had virtually no countertop space to actually cook with.

Even though we made a lot of purging decisions, the whole thing just wasn't practical for use anymore. After truly believing it would take us 5 years to accomplish, we were able to remodel our kitchen back in March by using IKEA cabinets and Home Depot countertops.

BEFORE: Our white and gray cabinets (left)
AFTER: Our newly renovated (right)

I'd like to note that this all started because our faucet was going out, haha! I asked for a new faucet, and Mike suggested replacing the disgusting and damaged laminate countertop, along with the super shallow sink and cheap faucet. Jokingly, I suggested redoing the whole kitchen. Then the lockdown happened, all our plans for the next year were canceled. With careful planning, we had all the means necessary to redo our kitchen ourselves with minimal hired help.

After really debating between IKEA, Home Depot and Lowe's for the cabinetry, we ultimately landed on IKEA through the help of bloggers and YouTubers. IKEA's Sektion line prices up alongside the Home Depot and Lowe's basic shaker cabinets that are both prebuilt and not prebuilt. IKEA's cabinetry is made a bit thicker than the other lines and f more affordable in the long run. What helped solidify our decision was watching Home RenoVision DIY's video and seeing how much easier it was to tackle the self-installation process for the IKEA cabinets. Looking back, it was the smartest decision we could have made!

Mike's older sister had an IKEA kitchen installation done for her previous house, along with their quartz countertop, but timing made us end up going through Home Depot instead. After comparing pricing and quality, we realized that Home Depot would be where our money would be better spent. We ended up spending almost $500 less with HD and got our cabinets installed in 10 days, versus an estimated 3 weeks through IKEA. Granted, we did all of this during a pandemic so we expected to only get long turnaround times.

In fact, that's a great thing to mention: we started this whole process an entire year ago to this day. It took us a total of 5 months to be able to track down all of the parts for our kitchen because massive production and shipping delays heavily hurt IKEA's inventory levels, and we even had to change a few aspects about one section of our kitchen to accommodate that. I even had to drive to San Diego during a trip to Anaheim to grab the last of the cover panels we needed for the cabinets. Despite this headache, it was actually pretty nice that all of our purchases got spread out because it made recovering from the large purchases easier to deal with.

BEFORE: Our old bar-height dining room with our small buffet table (left)
AFTER: The buffet cabinets with our new chair-height dining table (right)

To help extend the size of our kitchen, we installed 15" deep cabinets in our dining to act as a built-in buffet table for the space. This has made the biggest world of difference in our daily life as well fort the few gatherings we've had because we have a counter to help store food, and cashier's to store our bar, small appliances, and entertaining platters. It makes it dining nook feel elegant, organized, and complete. Our old buffet table just never really worked in this space and became an eyesore.

For our tile backsplash design, we went with a more modern take on subway tile with a 3x12 tile in a staircase pattern. We used Daltile's Restore tile in Bright White from Home Depot, which has a 1/16" grout spacing built into the tile. Honestly, tiling the wall with these tiles was not nearly as hard as I thought they'd be. The most complicated part was cutting the tile to go around plugs and the sides of the cabinets. We were lucky enough to borrow a tool for this. If you're tackling the backsplash yourself like we did, consider mosaic tile, which is FAR easier to deal with. We saved almost $800 doing the tile ourselves!

Over the next couple of weeks, I'll be going over the costs of everything, very important tips we learned going into and coming out of this project, and our honest opinions on all the products we used. I'll even be covering a shopping haul I did for all of our new gadgets and accessories for the kitchen! This is a series you will not want to miss!

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Check out the full series here:

Important Tips for Remodeling an IKEA Kitchen
The Cost of Our IKEA Kitchen
How to Save on a Kitchen Remodel
New Kitchen Haul