Great 2012 Remodel: Kitchen!

Drum roll please... I'm finally posting about the kitchen!

I was going to save the kitchen for last because it's the most dramatic change, but there is still one room left  that I still haven't posted about.  The guest room still needs a new bed to replace the one the painters broke (which we're planning to get next week), so I can't finish that post yet.  But the kitchen after pictures are ready... So here you go, pictures of the room everyone seems to comment on the most, the Kitchen...

Before:

This picture shows some of the worse things we were trying to fix with the whole remodel: scratched laminate, blue counter tops, no cabinet hardware, and one of the drawers didn't even match.

Day 1: Granite Counter-tops 

Day 2: Tile started

Day 3: Tile floor and back-splash finished.

Day 4: Cabinets preped for painting and starting to remove wall paper border.

Day 5: Cabinets painted

Day 6: Painting the walls

Painters didn't understand at first that the half wall should also be blue.

 Day 7: Paint finished

Day 8: The kitchen became the new storage space to make room for new carpet in the rest of the house.

Day 9: New Lights!

And here's how it looks today...

One of my favorite parts of the whole remodel: no more leaky faucet, we now have a working sprayer, and the "shallow" side of the new sink is good deal deeper than the old one... all together, a much more functional sink.

And the side by side views:

So here's a summary of what we did:

• New counter tops (granite instead of blue laminate)
• New back-splash (tile instead of blue laminate)
• New sink
• New sink faucet
• Painted the cabinets
• Added cabinet hardware
• Replaced the laminate flooring with tile
• Expanded the tile area to go all the way to the other wall
• 2 New light fixtures (in particular, replacing the old florescent light)
• Painted the ceiling (the kitchen was the primary cause for painting all the ceilings in the house... there were clusters of spots on the ceiling... we never could figure out what the previous owners could have done to create the spots)
• Painted the walls (a beautiful blue color... note to whomever made the original selections for this house, blue looks much better on the walls than on the cabinets)

Thank you, Hillary, for helping me realize that white was the way to go with the cabinets despite my initial hesitation; I love it.  And thanks for all your help with this whole process... we could not have done it all without you!