I’m SO excited to finally be showing you some… let’s not call it quite done… but closer-to-done pictures of our renovated kitchen. It took three and a half years of planning, two full months of construction, and eight straight days of painting to get to this point, and we don’t regret a single second (except maybe those three+ years when we didn’t have this kitchen!). There are still a few projects we want to finish (like putting up the open shelves next to the chimney), but we are ridiculously happy with what we have now. I could almost cry just writing this, just thinking about how far we’ve come and how much I love our new kitchen.

So before we get into the new pictures, let’s go back and remember what we started with…

Honestly, these pictures make the room look better than it was. It was ok-ish from a distance, almost even cute (because we worked really hard to make it look cute!), but when you got closer, the cabinets were totally beat up (and cheap), the vinyl floor was peeling up around the edges, a huge chunk of the tile floor was missing (which you can read about here), the backsplash was ugly, our chimney was hiding under layers and layers of drywall and tile (read about that one here), and it was overall not the beautiful kitchen our beautiful house deserves.

We dreamed of updating to an “urban farmhouse kitchen” appropriate to our historic home and shared our plans with you here. Then there was two months of this…

Including finding out that, yay, our chimney was salvageable, but boo, the original wood floors were not (read about that drama here), which ended up working out perfectly since now we have new oak floors to match the rest of the house. After the construction crew was all finished right around Christmas, it looked like this for about a month…

Before we finally got around to this…

And now, finally… HERE’S OUR CLOSER-TO-DONE KITCHEN!!!

This is the view from the hallway. The island in the middle is on wheels, so we move it around all the time. We’re planning on giving it a makeover soon to match the color of the cabinets (it’s slightly ivory while the cabinets are bright white).

It’s hard to tell in these pictures, but the new upper cabinets are more than a foot taller than the old ones. I have to stand on a ladder to reach past the second shelf, but I love that!

Being able to expose the original chimney was one of the most exciting parts of this renovation. We’re really lucky that it was still in excellent shape — and our contractors spent hours/days cleaning it up. We’re going to put open shelves to the right of the chimney.

Most of the walls are painted Valspar’s Seashell Gray.

We painted this one wall with black chalkboard paint. We were really unsure of it at first, when it was super pitch black, but after “priming” it with chalk, we love the way it looks. I’ll probably write about this process next week. On this wall is the back door and the door to the pantry (which is a whole other room).

From this angle you can see the pantry door on the right with the hallway door next to it. That’s the hallway that we just painted the same light grey as the kitchen. The pantry will be painted the same, too.

The mason jar-inspired pendant light is from West Elm and it’s awesome in every possibly way. We needed a lot more light in this room, so this is perfect.

Glass doors were on my must-have list. I love them. (Ignore all the missing light switch covers. Like I said, closer-to-done, not totally done.)

Let’s be honest, our stainless steel farmhouse sink kicks butt. Our contractor actually picked it out himself and surprised us with it!

And since nothing is more more fun than a side-by-side before-and-after, here you go. Crazy right?!! I promise you this is the same house!!

What I love most about our new kitchen is that it’s classic and timeless while also being modern and fun. There are elements that are certainly trendy right now, and all of the stainless makes this room feel updated and cool. But every single decision we make in any major construction is based on what works for this house and our budget and what will stand the test of time. The white shaker cabinets, white subway tile backsplash, soapstone countertops, farmhouse sink, oak floors, exposed chimney — all of these elements could have been or were original to our 1890 home and could continue to feel right for this home 10, 20, even 124 years from now.