Kitchen

Kitchen Renovations

When we first visited the house with the realtor, I kept seeing all the interesting historic details, the numerous spacious rooms, the high ceilings, the land, the views, the outbuildings. The POTENTIAL.

Ken on the other hand saw that in its current condition, the place looked like crap. His first words after we left the realtor behind were, “I hate it!” My astonished reply: “Really? I love it!”

A little more discussion revealed that what bothered him most was the horrible (truly, truly HORRIBLE!) kitchen. We compromised by deciding that we’d buy the house and renovate the kitchen immediately.

Text Box: This is what the kitchen looked like the day we came to look at the house to see if we wanted to buy it. Can you blame Ken for his negative initial reaction? The realtor’s words to the owner as we walked into this room, “Why, Mr. Ray! You’ve cleaned up!”

Text Box: This is how the kitchen looked for the first few months we lived here. Notice that there are FIVE different colors of paint on the walls and woodwork: gray, green, yellow, blue, and orange!

When we moved in, my sister Donna came down to help me try to make the place livable. She spent hours scraping and scrubbing the crud off the kitchen floor before we finally gave up and decided that what was underneath the grime wasn’t salvageable. We installed new flooring over the old instead.