Kitchen Refurbishing & Re-modeling

Yes, the title is correct, our kitchen has been refurbished & we are just finished with a re-modeling of our IKEA kitchen since we bought our house 5 years ago.

The picture below is from the sales brochure.

You can´t believe how dirty, greasy and outdated this kitchen was, didn´t even try to clean and save anything of it. We had saved up for a new kitchen. So down goes this old one, and I mean absolutely everything apart from the ceiling.

We both wanted IKEA Bodbyn in the color grey, and we bought as much as possible we could for our money without thinking too much about design and how practical the kitchen would be in the end.

It looked actually quite OK, nothing fancy, a high tech kitchen would look stupid in our old house and add no extra value at all.

But when you really start to live in your house and use your rooms, you discover things you didn´t think about. We had one window in our kitchen, it faced north, so we had very little natural daylight. Then add the grey kitchen from "top to bottom", dark counter tops, curtains and all the stuff you have on display on your counter tops, it was so dark. We tried to fix that with lighting, but even there we failed. We had moved the kitchen hood from the original place and the fan was just circulating inside the kitchen, so every time we had steak it was terrible.

So this year we had saved up a little more and really planned how to re-model our kitchen. I do like the Country kitchen style, and that was the inspiration for this re-modeling. We wanted to re-use as much as possible of the cupboards, add oak counter tops and move the hood back to the original place. We also wanted a gas top, as we missed cooking with gas from the years we lived in Ireland. And add a kitchen island, my dream :)

We removed the corner wall cupboards on both sides, and as you can see, we removed all cupboards on one side of the kitchen. The oven and microwave was moved to the other side, and we could the re-use cabinets and make the kitchen island. The oak counter tops made such a difference we could hardly believe it, and we changed the lighting as well.

I have now my dream kitchen thanks to my wonderful husband. It feels a lot bigger, it is so much more lighter and also so much more practical. I simply love it, and maybe you´ll be a little inspired on how to re-furbish or re-model your kitchen. Quite a different kitchen don´t you think?