We are in the process of renovating our kitchen in our 1912 dogtrot farmhouse. The original kitchen was in the center block/room of the house, and my husband’s grandparents raised 9 children with that kitchen, which was the heart of the home. The other two rooms were bedrooms.
In 1968, they closed in one of the porches for a kitchen, and that’s what we are renovating. We are trying to respect the past, but also make it easier to operate for our family, and as us soon-to-be-empty-nesters age!
Previous Renovations
Here are “before” photos. We replaced the floor with this laminate tile in September of 2017 and it has been great! Super easy to clean.
Before that, I have repainted three times since getting married. First, in 1992, a pale Williamsburg blue with lovely 1990s navy wallpaper border and that’s when I painted the cabinets white; then later, a pale green with another fun wallpaper border, and then about 2015 this muted greenish blue. We had the cabinet unit at the end (with glass uppers) built in the mid-1990s and had crews move it into the kitchen 8 feet or so to create a walk-in pantry behind it.
Big Question: Where will the dogs lie now!?? They usually lie out of the way where the blue rug is, above.
What we really needed was better windows and better storage, with drawers instead of difficult-to-access storage. We visited a few friend’s newly-renovated kitchens and were pleased to find an excellent local cabinet craftsman to provide what we wanted in cabinets and to also work with some of our own wood for a butcher-block countertop and open shelving.
I got some Home Designer software – the most basic I could manage to learn in a short time, and worked up the concept.
With cabinet contractor Blake Melton on board, quartz countertops from Granite Gallery in Sheffield, and Rodney Windham scheduled to do installation of windows, demo, and pretty much everything else, we were ready to begin.
May 18th our daughter graduated high school, and we had all four kids home, Sunday dinner after church, and then when everyone got on the road, Kirby and I started emptying out all the cabinets and drawers. I’m a bit ashamed to say I don’t think I ever got back in the deep dark corner cabinets – who knew what we would find! We currently have stuff stored all over the house – top of the piano to our son’s room, and even in the front entry hall!
