Flooded Kitchen to New Kitchen

My kitchen was flooded by Hurricane Harvey.

I have a new kitchen and I love it!  I was not expecting a new kitchen but my house flooded.  No one wants to flood and this was very unexpected but life has a way of throwing obstacles in your way and you just have to learn to deal with it or in my case, go with the flow.

The last thing I saw when leaving my house after water started coming in was my lower cabinets going underwater.  Once we came back, the demo started.  That included tearing out all the lower cabinets, ripping out the sheetrock and removing all the appliances.

Our makeshift kitchen was in the garage.  We had a hot plate and an electric skillet. We did what we had to do and we all survived.

Designing a new kitchen for convenience

If you are going to get a new kitchen, you might as well get what you want.  I had no idea what I wanted as far as style or design.  I did know that I wanted all the furdowns torn out.  Furdowns are the sheetrocked spaces above your cabinets.  Sometimes they are used to allow pipes or ductwork to make there way around the house.  I was very lucky in that I had nothing inside mine so I could use that space for higher cabinets.

My cabinets are custom cabinets and are made of birch.  My contractor wanted to use maple but I wanted painted cabinets and I could have never brought myself to paint maple.  I had a request of crown moulding and that all lower cabinets have drawers.  There is nothing worse than squatting down and having to dig things out in the back of a cabinet.  No more!  I open the cabinet doors and pull out the drawers.

The other issue I had was dead space in my lower corner cabinets.  Before, I was on the floor trying to push or pull things out.  That had to be remedied in the new kitchen.

I took full advantage of my new kitchen.  I moved the refrigerator.  The small easy bake oven on the wall was moved and changed into a full range. A pot rack was also added to the kitchen in a lower cabinet.  Convenience was a major concern for the kitchen.

Style and design

After I knew what conveniences I wanted for my kitchen, then the style of the kitchen was the next step.  What kind of tile, what color cabinets, what type of flooring?  A lot of decisions had to be made and I was more than happy to figure all of this out.

After a lot of thinking and researching,  I knew I wanted my upper cabinets to be a different color than my lower cabinets.  I decided on white cabinets for my upper cabinets but had no idea what I wanted for my lower cabinets.

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The next item for the kitchen was to pick out tile.  I had actually decided on getting white subway tile.  Off to Floor & Decor, I go.  Once I got to the store, I changed my mind.  Talk about choices.  I loved them all and I wanted them all.  My husband and I kept looking and then we turned down an aisle and there it was.  The tile of my dreams.  My husband said this is the one and I agreed.  We went with our gut.  It was the only tile that we both had a big reaction to how much we liked it.

The choice for the color of the lower cabinets was made easy after we chose our tile and blue it was for my lower cabinets.  I used Sherwin Williams “Bohemian Lace” for my white color on the upper cabinets and Sherwin Williams “Bracing Blue” for my lower cabinets.

The other choices in the kitchen included countertops.  Quartz was my first and only choice for countertops.  It never has to be sealed and it is not porous.  Nothing gets into the countertop like juices from raw chicken.

The last choice to make was the kitchen sink.  I chose a 36-inch Farmhouse sink.  I bought it from Overstock.com.  This sink is huge.  I can fit anything in this sink. It is beautiful.

Taking a sad, desperate time in our lives with flooding and turning it into something beautiful is a happy ending.  Life gave us lemons and flooding and we turned it into lemonade and a kitchen of my dreams.

Until next time,

Kari

 

They said they were contractors!