Kitchen Reveal

At long last, here is my kitchen reveal:

The doors next to the fridge lead to my office (on the left) and my walk-in pantry (on the right). I love having my office right off the kitchen - I'm in the heart of it all and I get so much more done having my own space.  If it gets messy, I just close the door.

 Here you can get a better idea of how we faked a counter depth fridge.  The cabinets along the stove wall are set out from the wall 4 inches making the counter 29 inches deep rather than 25.  This gives the illusion of having a counter depth fridge. If we didn't do it, you'd see four inches more of the side of the fridge.  It also gives us a nice little space between the back of the stove and the wall.

We also had to cut down the cabinet above the fridge - Ron Fritz and John Laurie installed the kitchen and did all the finishing work inside as well as the siding on the outside.  They did a fabulous job - we could not have done this job without them.  They are exceedingly patient and easy to get along with. I love them. If you want a local referral, email me and I'll give you their deets.

Because the fridge is such a monster, it wasn't going to fit under the standard 16 inch cabinet we bought from Ikea.  So Ron cut it down to 12 inches high and I had two custom doors made locally to match.  You can't even tell.

Source List: 

Ikea's Tidaholm oak shaker-style door (custom sprayed)

Cabinet spraying by Christone Finishing in Vancouver

Luftig Hood Fan from Ikea

Caesarstone polished counters in 'Concrete'

White subway tiles from Lowe's

Price Pfister Hanover faucet

Appliances

I bought my appliances long before I planned my kitchen layout. I lucked out and everything worked out fine, but because I was working with Ikea kitchen cabinets that only come in standard sizes, I probably should have waited to buy my appliances. As it was, they went into a storage unit for six months before the kitchen was ready.  How naive of me to think that I would need them that early in the game.

Anyway, I needed four appliances: a dishwasher, stove, hood fan and fridge. I wanted them to match, I wanted stainless and other than specifying a counter depth fridge and dual fuel stove, I wasn't too fussed.  I opted for the Frigidaire Professional Series because I was able to buy the previous year's model of stove for a smoking deal.

I picked this Price Pfister faucet (from the Hanover collection) to go with my stainless appliances. I think it blends traditional and contemporary very nicely.

I realized pretty quickly that counter depth fridges are expensive. I opted instead to build out my lower cabinets four inches from the wall to give the illusion that the fridge was counter depth (29 inches instead of the standard 25).  It didn't cost me anything to do that, and it also gave me a deeper counter which I love.

I bought the Luftig Hood Fan from Ikea - and because I bought an appliance at the same time as I ordered my cabinets during their kitchen event, I got 20% back in gift cards - to the tune of almost $1300.

Kitchen Inspiration

I love Ikea. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that Ikea saved me from mom burnout on more than one occasion.  When I was a new Mom with four little kids, we had just moved to Vancouver and Ikea became my haven. It was where I went to have forty-five minutes to myself - Ikea has free babysitting!  I would wander around, basking in the quiet, gloriously alone and would just look at the displays - the only things I ever remembering buying were toy storage, tea lights and big packages of napkins. 

Fast forward a number of years, and Ikea's free childcare paid off for them in spades.

Before deciding which direction to go with my own kitchen, I did A LOT of research. Our kitchen was the part of the reno that I looked forward to the most. Being a design show junkie, I had watched with interest as Colin and Justin and Sarah Richardson and others used Ikea kitchen cabinets to create beautiful and functional kitchens.

Sarah's House on HGTV

I found some great resources on other blogs as well.  Vanessa from Decor Happy has some great pics of Ikea kitchens.  I've also seen a recent post on Aubrey & Linday's blog too.

And if you are looking for a great how-to on navigating the Ikea kitchen experience, Carol Reed from Creed has two excellent posts here and here. I couldn't have done my kitchen without Carol's tips - in fact, I followed her guides pretty much exactly. I also found a fantastic Vancouver sprayer/painter and a paint supplier through a comment posted on Carol's second Ikea post.

It was a bit of a process and certainly a lot more work than hiring a kitchen designer.  But using Ikea saved me a ton of money and that allowed me to splurge on some other items that I probably wouldn't have been able to afford otherwise (like beautiful Caesarstone counters) and stainless appliances.

I couldn't be more thrilled with the end result.
Stay tuned for more pictures.

{Halloween}

It was mayhem this weekend with multiple Halloween parties (for the boys and Em), a dance (for Kyle), and a birthday party (for Liam).  I'm partied out and it isn't even Halloween yet.

I bought Candy Melts and made some very cute mummy cookies (found at How Does She via Pinterest).  They are so easy! All you need is Oreos, white candy melts, a ribbon tip and piping bag, and googly candy eyes.

And then after all the parties, my friend Karie came over and we made more mummy cookies and chocolate dipped pretzel sticks until 11:30 Friday night.

We also made sugar cookies (check out this awesome recipe at Mel's Kitchen) and decorated them with the kids. So fun! 

I forgot to take a picture of the table before the kids decimated it, but here it is after they started eating.  I used Wilton's Sparkly Gel Icing for the spiderweb cupcakes.

Upstairs

In case you haven't read my entire blog from the beginning, the reason we did this crazy renovation was because we wanted our main living space to be on the ground floor, and we wanted five bedrooms upstairs. That meant we planned to flip our layout, moving our kitchen, living room and dining room from upstairs to down.

Hence, the clever name of my blog - the Upside Down Home. Get it?

The upstairs kitchen would become the fourth bedroom, the dining room would become the fifth bedroom, the living room would become a family room.

You can read about the strange phenomenon that is the BC Basement Entry here.

As I am writing these posts I'm realizing what a bad blogger I am - I have terrible before shots. As in, no before shots.  You're going to have to make do with random family pictures that show a little of the room behind. And a lot of my in-progress pictures were taken on my iPhone - I'm warning you now.

Here is the upstairs living room. Post reno it will be the kids' hang-out room where they can numb their minds on video games and Nickelodeon. You can see the railing for the staircase behind the couch on the right - post reno the stairs will come up at the far right of the picture where that lamp is.

Here's the old kitchen in all its former glory:

Framing & Demo

Once the foundation was done, we moved into the framing phase.  It went pretty quickly and it was exciting to see our plans come to life. I had walked through these rooms in my head for the past year - really walking through them was a bit surreal.

Looking from foyer through the kids desk area and beyond to the dining room

The trusses were delivered and went up very quickly:

... at the same time the old, upstairs kitchen was demolished and the super sexy orange oak cabinets were taken away to my plumber's workshop.

The old kitchen would eventually become my oldest son's bedroom.

The stairs were removed and the new staircase was 180'd. The new stairs stayed in the same location/corridor as the old ones, but they were rebuilt in the opposite direction. This picture was taken from what was the top of the landing of the old staircase.

Excuse the blurry iPhone photos.

Well, it's done but you're not going to see it just yet

First of all, I should say that the reno process was arduous, long, and frustrating.  I had the best of intentions to blog these amazing posts throughout my reno, a la DIY Diva, but truthfully I began to loathe the process so much that the last thing I wanted to do was blog about it.

I know, I'm a sissy.

Anyway, now it's June and we've been back in the house for four weeks now and I'm finally emotionally ready to blog about what was, without a doubt, one of the most stressful periods of my life.  I wonder if it had anything to do with the fact we went massively over budget and bought a restaurant at the same time as we were renovating? Or maybe it was the fact that we were trying to do it while not sucking as parents to our four kids? You know you're renovating when you feed your kids at the Subway at the front of Home Depot three times in one week.

So, stay tuned for a retrospective of sorts as I get you up to speed so that I can post some {long overdue} reveals.