Kitchen Overhaul on a Student Budget

I made it to the US!  Flying home on a one way ticket was a bittersweet reminder that I am leaving our old lives behind and starting off on something new.  We are in between homes at the moment-- the apartment in Vienna has been packed up and cleared out, but we don't have a place picked out in Louisville yet.  So I was thinking, since I can’t get my hands on any projects in our new place yet, I thought I’d take a look back at a couple of our very first and favorite DIY experiments.

Before we moved to Germany, we owned a house in Ambridge, PA, where we both attended seminary.  This place was a serious fixer-upper, but the incredibly low housing prices in our depressed former steel town meant that we could afford to take a few risks.  We had so much fun the summer before classes began, working together all day, every day on projects that would make this house our own.

Home Sweet Home

Our first major project in this house was to tackle the kitchen.  Because the owner had rented to seminary students for years, nothing in the room had been updated in AGES.  Maybe since the room was built onto the back of the house decades before.  There were plenty of challenges: the space was unbelievably tiny, there were no real cabinets to speak of, and the pea green trim color was incredibly unappetizing.  

While we did most of the renovations ourselves, we did have professionals knock out a wall another random room in the house to open up the kitchen and give us an extra eat-in area.  I'm glad we did!  Even though it was not a load bearing wall, I was grateful not to have to worry about being responsible for the roof caving in!

Our second step was to strip the room down, removing the ancient stove, the old built in metal sink and the many layers of old vinyl flooring.  Thankfully underneath all of those layers we found hardwood floors matching the rest of the house- such a great surprise.  In order to remove the adhesive from the old kitchen flooring and to connect the two sections into one larger room, we needed to refinish the hardwood.  You can often rent sanding machines at your local hardware store to removed any old glue and the previous finish, giving you a clean wooden surface ready for staining.  Of course hiring someone to do this for you is much easier!  But as I mentioned, we were students-- with lots of time and not much money-- so do it yourself was our motto:)

The ceilings had been covered with that lovely textured, popcorny stuff popular in the 70s, a look we weren't too thrilled with.  Thankfully that comes off with a special scraping tool and some old fashioned elbow grease.  

Here's a photo from about halfway through the project.  You can see the floors have been refinished, the ceiling scraped and the trim and walls painted in a celedon green that's one of our favorite colors.

After researching our options for cabinets, we decided to go with preassembled, simple white ones from either Home Depot or Lowe's (it's terrible that I can't remember!).  Since their weight makes installing the upper cabinets a job for more than the two of us, we enlisted the help of some good friends to help us drill everything into place.  To be ready for this stage, I read all about how to install cabinets on websites like diy network, youtube and others.  Thank goodness for google!

This photo was taken just after installing the the last countertops and sink basin, so nearly everything was finished at this point.  This part of the room is where the original kitchen was, although the cabinets in the foreground on the left would have been right where the old dividing wall was.  

Here you can see how removing that wall opened up the space for us.  Best decision ever!  This photo is from very early on after we had moved in, and sadly I don't have any more updated ones to show you.  But you get the idea.

We loved this kitchen and were SO proud of ourselves for how much we had accomplished, despite the inevitable little blemishes as evidence that this work was not professional.  Jady and I both love to cook and to entertain, and we had some happy times in this room with so many good friends. Like Melina, who's looking glamorous in this photo, per usual, in our kitchen at Thanksgiving.

xo


Liza