The story of our kitchen

Oh Mint House kitchen...

When Ben first showed me Mint House, my first reaction was "nope" and the biggest reason was the kitchen.  We use our kitchen A LOT; we like to cook, people are always eating, there are 5 of us and Maya is always trying to be a part of the party!  This dinky kitchen was not going to work.  When our realtor walked through with Ben, I asked where they kept their food.  There was a family living there and she could not figure out where their food was!  Storage was definitely an issue, but I had no idea it would be our smallest issue.

We bought Mint House and embraced the simple life of a small kitchen.  This house is 100 years old and clearly people have been just fine for centuries before us, so we can also figure it out.

This was the kitchen when we moved in:

 

 

What you can't see in the picture is the layer of curry grimy goop that covered every surface and the fact that only one burner on the stove worked.  Also, those curtains that look beautifully vintage?  Yeah, they were yellow from the curry grossness.

Our stuff being delayed ended up being a blessing and it gave me time to SCRUB and scrape the kitchen down.  I have never deep cleaned so much in my entire life.  It was so extreme that I smashed my wedding ring while attempting to scrub out the freezer.  It looked like a crime scene for a few days.

 

 

The cabinets grossed me out so much that I decided to take matters into my own hands.  I watched YouTube while cleaning and taught myself how to paint them.

 

 

 

Within a few weeks, we had the cabinets completely painted with new hardware AND we got a new stove.  We also replaced the window treatments, installed under cabinet lighting and painted the walls.  That alone made the space feel so much better.  

  

Pretty much as soon as I was done, Ben commented that for how small the space it, it probably wouldn't be too much to replace the countertops and backsplash.  I still love what I picked, but I did chose the cabinet color to try and make the existing backsplash make sense.  We decided that we'd like to enjoy new countertops for as long as can and took a gamble on what we thought would look good.  But NY is weird  and we were told that it was our responsibility to remove the existing countertops and backsplash.  So, while the kids and I were in Kansas, Ben demoed the kitchen!

  

As with everything in an old home, nothing is easy and the backsplash decided to take the sheet rock with it, so Ben had to also replace that.

 

 

We had to "camp" for just a few days when we got back in town while we waited for the new countertops, but it was very worth it.

We decided to save some money and install the backsplash ourselves.  I say we, as I fully intended to help, but the space is so small that it just didn't work for both of us in there, so Ben did the whole thing himself.

Not pictured, Ben also had to rewire the dishwasher, rework the plumbing and install the faucet and I'm pretty sure several other things I didn't even know about.  He put so much work into this kitchen and it turned out great!

 

And just when you thought we were done...house projects tend to snowball and as soon as we finished the kitchen, the floor just stuck out like a huge sore thumb.  I have always hated the floor, but tried to look past it.  But now it was SHOUTING at me and it needed to be silenced.  So, while Ben was fishing in Canada with my dad, I painted the tile!  Well, first I had to scrub...7 hours of scrubbing got the tile from this:

 

To this: 

This is what living through the project looked like:

  

And it's painted!

It was maybe one of the most stressful projects.  Once I made the first paint stroke, it was done...there's no going back from a painted floor!  I was so nervous about anything and everything scratching the paint.  It will need some touch-ups over time, but I think it was very worth the effort.

The final kitchen!  I'm thankful every day that we put the work in to make this space something we love and feel comfortable in.