Kitchen Before and After

I’ve got a few pictures to share. Note that there are still a couple of small things to finish up in the kitchen (baseboard near the dining room, trim around the exterior door, and we’re waiting on an 18″ deep cabinet to put in the passage way to the dining room), but the majority of the work is done. These aren’t the best pictures, but I’ve decided not to wait any longer to get the ‘perfect’ ones.

This is what it used to look like if you were entering the kitchen from the dining room. 

We took out the dumbwaiter, in favour of widening the opening to create a wider passage way to the kitchen. Since the dumbwaiter only went down to the basement, not up to the bedrooms above, it wouldn’t really be useful to us, even as a laundry chute.

If you keep walking into the kitchen, this is what you used to see on the south wall.

This is what you see now.

To your left used to be a window to the mudroom. I suspect at one time the mudroom was an open porch, but we didn’t see the value in a window into a mudroom…

…so we boarded over it in favour of a tall pantry cabinet, with rolling shelf-drawers.

If you look to your right, you used to see the fridge, nestled in the corner of the staircase to the basement, with a landing that had a doorway to the back room, which we’re told was a summer kitchen at one time. That door that looks like a cabinet? It opened into the stairwell. Don’t ask me. That’s one of at least 3 doors in the house that go (went) nowhere.

We (uh.. Jay, mostly) built new stairs to the basement below the existing stairs to the second story. We lost a closet, but gained a house that makes a tiny modicum of sense.

Here you can see the door to the old basement stairs. Now, look back at the ‘old’ picture of the southwest corner. See that dishwasher? That’s one of the rolling dishwashers you hook up to a sink. Now scroll back down to the picture below. See where the sink is, behind the dish rack? See the basement door to the left? See Spot run. Run Spot Run! trapped in the basement when the dishwasher’s in use. We never used the dishwasher, and once we no longer wanted to use it as counter space, gave it away to my aunt, who loves it. 🙂

Another thing to note — we had to make the kitchen windows smaller (shorter), so that we could actually put in normal height counter tops.

I find it funny that the last time I took pictures of our old kitchen was last fall, when I had just started baking with the Heavenly Cake Bakers group. There’s the Barcelona Brownie Bars, getting made! Look, there’s a pumpkin on my counter!

Hey, look! Butternut Squash. 🙂

Thus completes the tour of the kitchen. Let’s head to the dining room to eat. This is the corner that still needs some work, but I can live with it like this for a while. 😉