Open Concept Kitchen

Apparently back in the 80’s, kitchens were not cool. They put their kitchen in the back of the house, surrounded by walls and closed off by doors. Was this a man’s way of keeping his woman in the kitchen – literally…? ;) I kid…

I LOVE kitchens. We are big foodies… not like crazy expensive obscure type of foodies. We just want good, clean, healthy, FLAVORFUL food – and we love to cook everything from scratch (we don’t even own a microwave… yet). My husband is a phenomenal cook (I think I have mentioned that a time or two!), so we both wanted a beautiful kitchen that was the center of our home, since that is where we would be spending most of our time.

To my dismay, our kitchen was surrounded by walls and closed off by doors with locks (let’s not even mention the HOT PINK counter tops, outdated appliances, and bright flowered wallpaper!). After we did our first walk through (before we even bought it) I created a before and after floor plan – if Ben wasn’t game for the project, I wasn’t going to buy the house. Here were my plans:

Before

After!!!

As you can see, I wanted to tear down the large wall that closed off the kitchen/breakfast nook and living room. I wanted sight lines from the stove top to the family room. Ben seemed all for the demo, at the time.  Unfortunately, once we got into the attic, we saw that that wall was the major loading bearing wall. What was going to be a simple wall removal turned into a wall reconstruction (with plumbing and electrical) – WAY harder. 

We blew out the long back wall and kept the side wall for stability. My dad suggested that we cut a large window out of that wall to create an illusion of having clear sight lines, with minimal obstructions. Instead of blowing out the doorway like I wanted, we just “super sized” the doorway to help deter you from feeling like it was supposed to have a door there at one point.

This is what we ended up with:

Our contractor who installed our granite thought to put the granite in the window cut out as well, to help tie in the room. I loved it.

This project actually was very cheap – we reused all the wood from the demo to restructure the columns and half wall (including the baseboards!).  We had to buy a few sheets of dry wall ($8.16 each), and we used leftover mud and paint to texture/color the walls. The most expensive part was the bullnose corners we needed to use to round the corners all over the column/half wall ($3.25 x 12). Ben will probably never gain back those many hours he spent sweating over this wall – reconstruction around load bearing walls is not easy. He will definitely think twice before we do this again :) ! BUT it looks GORGEOUS – I think it was totally worth it!