Our Dream Kitchen : Before & After

As my first post, I’d like to kick off with a post of before and after of our kitchen.

Andrew and I had been looking for a new place to live, but we didn’t want just any home. We were looking for a home that would allow us to bring our dreams and visions to life, and a home that would welcome our friends and family. We found just that!!

With quite a bit of TLC needed, this just excited us more. We could see past the rotting kitchen, the poorly tiled floors, the bad layout and the general lack of care.

I’ll start off with our kitchen make over because this was high on our priority list to redo. It’s an important space for us because it allows us to prepare meals for each other, as well as for others. The kitchen also provides us the opportunity to bring our most loved together and share quality time with them.

We felt that the original design of the kitchen was unwelcoming and didn’t allow us the space to really host. It was tucked away in a boxy, cramped design and isolated whoever was working in the kitchen away from the rest of the living spaces. I’ve posted a picture below of how the kitchen was lived in by the previous tenants. So gloomy and cramped!

And here’s a picture of Andrew in the empty kitchen – already it was starting to look better!

We decided to strip our entire kitchen down to the shell and what was good of the kitchen, we donated to an orphanage. We strongly believe in blessing others because what you sow you reap. And by giving the kitchen to an orphanage in need, even though our budget was tight, that we would stand together and believe that a way would be made for the renovation to go smoothly and for us to afford it. All the fun had finally begun. We broke a double doorway through the wall you see on the right hand side with the microwave cupboard, just to open up the space, let more light in and make the general flow better.

Just putting this doorway in alone was a massive improvement

At this point, I had been drawing away to come up with a kitchen design that reflected both our characters. We wanted a kitchen that was sophisticated but still had a youthfulness to it. We drove around town sourcing all our finishes, some of which we had to order in as we could not find them in Durban. The metro tiles on the wall we found at Italtile, they also helped us source the round pennytiles that we used on the backsplash (so worth the 2 week wait). The locally available granite was not what we were envisioning so we found an importer and personally chose our granite slab. Our slab comes from a desert in India. When we first laid eyes on it, we just knew it was right. It’s a natural work of art and is simply stunning. We found our box light on sale at Sutherlands home furnishing (what a bargain). We actually bought our light before we even knew what we were doing with the kitchen. The handles for the drawers were another story 🙂 I am extremely fussy and knew exactly what I was looking for, but what I was looking for was so hard to find. I drove all over town to the usual handle shops (Gelmar, Roco etc.) but was certain I would not compromise just because they didn’t have what I was after. Andrew left the handles to me because these are the finer details which I usually tend to focus on more. I landed up buying 3 differant handles from Handles Inc. (a small exclusive handle shop) to mix and match: the cup handles, the detailed bar pull handles and knobs for the display cabinets. Again, so worth hunting around for! 🙂

This is the drawing design I did for our kitchen

After working closely with our kitchen installer, our dream kitchen came to life. Below are some pictures of our final kitchen. We are so proud that we stuck to our vision and that it became a reality so smoothly! I hope you love it just as much as we do