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The kitchen reno is about to begin. We're gutting the whole kitchen down to the studs and rebuilding it but first, some pictures of what it looks like now.

The stupid corner

The other side of the wall with the fridge is the stairway leading down to the basement. It's a small house, so the headroom for the stairs cuts into the kitchen space. It's hidden in the corner base cabinet where the microwave sits. That's a lot of prime storage space gone. Oh well, we'll make do. The fridge is currently where our new dual fuel range will go and the fridge will go in the corner where the old range is now.

The fridge's new home

The counter is one of my least favourite features. It's a tiled counter with wood trim. Kevin asked me what I thought of the counter when he first came to look at the job. I told him it was breeding ground for bacteria. Not only is the grout difficult to keep clean (coffee stains it easily and only comes off with lots of scrubbing) but the tiles have a semi-rough surface, also difficult to keep clean. When we first moved in, it took me a couple hours to scrub down the counter. Then R came up from the basement with a box that had been sitting on the floor of a moving van. He went to put it on my clean counter. I think I scared him when I yelled "No! Don't put that on the counter, I just cleaned it!". Sorry, honey.

The tiled counter, with my favourite mug

Being a bungalow with ducts running under the floor, the bulkheads are empty wasted space so we're having them ripped out for taller wall cabinets. We're also planning to extend the counter to the far wall with the window. Originally, this was used by the previous owner as a little eat-in area with a small table for two. We decided we'd rather have more storage space. The slate floor is also going. On the surface, it looks nice but it's not very well installed and I had a slate floor in my last place. I'll admit it's a great look but it's another hard-to-clean surface. The irregular surface was great at chewing up my floor mop. I'm looking forward to having some nice, flat floor tiles.

Our cabinets are here!

For our cabinets, we went with Ikea. We like the look and the price. I can't wait until they're in.