Farmhouse Kitchen Reveal (Before & After)

7 years ago

last modified: 7 years ago

We replaced our 1948 farmhouse kitchen. Here's a few pics of the before:

We added a new mudroom and garage on to the house to get rid of this lowered entryway (doorway in the left of this pic) and opened up the stairwell behind this old pantry wall:

The doorway to the right is to the dining room:

Here's the after:

Materials used:

Local custom cabinet maker at that time did not produce white painted cabinets. After trying for an eternity to talk me out of a white kitchen, he agreed to install just the maple boxes and provided the cabinet doors from Walzcraft in "Pearl" finish. After the boxes were installed I painted them with Benjamin Moore Kitchen & Bath paint that was color-matched to the Pearl doors.

Since the kitchen is only 12.5 x 13.5, we also built a larder/pantry cupboard in the entryway (just a few steps away). It houses canned goods and crockpots/serving dishes/kitchen appliances that don't get used daily. Since we're so rural and seldom get to the grocery store and because our kids couldn't possibly be bothered to put their jackets on hangers, we also turned the entryway closet into a step-in pantry. Kids use hooks in the garage for wet snowpants and winter gear and the hooks on the other end of the mudroom for sweatshirts/jackets.

Perimeter cabinets are Formica Basalt Slate with integrated WilsonArt HD sink.

Island top is walnut, I apply Tung Oil once or twice a year.

Cup Pulls / Knobs / Hinges are all antique pewter finish.

Best improvements:

*Getting rid of the tiny entryway with steps up to the kitchen. If you were lucky enough not to fall down the basement stairs, you still had to overcome the challenge of squeezing up the three steps to the kitchen and climbing over the heap of shoes piled up in the corner of the kitchen. The new 16' mudroom/entry is great. I thought it would be too big at first, but it allows our whole family of 5 to spill into the house with backpacks/gym bags/groceries/etc without piling up and tripping all over each other.

* opening up the tiny doorway between the kitchen/dining room into an 8 foot wide arch. No more traffic jams between the dining room and kitchen!

* The larder and step-in pantry. We finally have storage for small kitchen appliances & food! We keep extra freezers and an extra fridge in the garage and dry & canned goods in the entryway pantry. No more trips to the basement to prep supper!

* Soft-close drawers and heavy-duty drawer slides... ahh the luxury!

Featured Answer

musicgalnd
Original Author

7 years ago

last modified: 7 years ago

mrspete - I love the cooktop on the range but despise the ovens. It's a Maytag Gemini we purchased in about 2012. I had an older (1990's?) Gemini double oven in my last house and loved it (which is why I bought this one), but I can't get it to bake evenly and it sucks at preheating. It will say it's preheated, then I'll insert food to cook or bake and then it says it's preheating again and it never gets back up to full temp, and then cooks/bakes unevenly and burns the bottom of everything. I'm pretty disappointed with it. If you can find a model that works well, the top smaller oven is super convenient. If I was a better baker, I think I'd have to swap it out - but this week I decided to treat myself to an Instant Pot instead...I hear it makes great cheesecake :)

My cabinet guy wasn't too happy with my choice of cabinets over the fridge. I wanted the top cabinets to all be the same depth, but he insisted that I wouldn't reach them if they didn't line up with the front of the fridge. I'm not even 5' tall and told him all fridge cabinets are useless to me - even if they do line up with fridge. Also, my parents recently had to hack into their over-fridge cabinets to install a new fridge, so I wanted to leave some space to update the fridge later. I can reach the baskets and use them a lot for hauling meals out to the field.

Ian Mac - laminate floors were from Lumber Liquidators: Warm Springs Chestnut

Joe - Nice acreages are tough to find in our area, so when we found a house with a decent foundation and shelterbelt, we grabbed it. 3 weeks later we got hit by a tornado and it wiped out most of the outbuildings and trees, but the tank of a house didn't move - must've been the weight of all the plaster with 97 coats of paint built up on the walls over the years? Living through the reno felt a lot like living through The Money Pit movie. The mudroom/laundry and garage additions were worth the pain though! Here's some before/after pics:

Iowacommute - here's a couple of closeups of the sink - the first one is with a few weeks of daily use grime, the second one is after I scrubbed it for a couple mins with a Scotchbrite. Wilsonart recommends using Ajax too, I use that about once a month and it really helps to spiff it up. I'm not super happy with the sink, it was recommended by our cabinet maker as the only option for an "undermount" (integrated) with Formica, but it's kind of a pain to keep clean and I've noticed some small cracks starting in the corners and around the drain. When I brought it up to kitchen guy, he lectured me for not using a grid in the bottom, I suppose that would help. I don't remember the name of the color of this sink, but it's not the white one... since our cabinet doors were Pearl, we went with the offwhite sink.

Before cleaning: