Kitchens Past - Our First Home

When we got married, we purchased the worst house we could find just so we could have a mortgage we could afford. We paid $300 a month, and this disaster of a kitchen became home.

It's hard to tell from the photo, but the cabinets were oddly sized, homemade ones with rusting hardware. When you opened a door, the scent of curry punched you in the nostrils. The walls were painted alternating ; lime green with yellow trim, and yellow walls with lime green trim. There were white lace curtains hung from a brass rod, and brass light fixtures filled with bugs. The countertops were chipped formica, and the tap was almost stuck shut with calcium deposits. The floor was covered with burns and black marks, and the stove was harvest gold and burnt everything we tried to cook.

When we first moved in, we painted the cabinets white, got new hardware, and painted the walls blue. We covered the countertops with some cheap black plastic "refresh your countertop" gimmicky stuff. The backsplash was covered in metal flashing to make it look like stainless steel, and we bought a floor model dented stove from Home Depot with leftover wedding money.

This is the only photo I can find of that time...you can see the painted cabinets with new hardware, and the nasty floor...but not much else.

Then we purchased new laminate countertops and installed a subway tile backsplash.

And later we added some inexpensive moulding to all of the door fronts, and bought a new sink and faucet from Ikea. I can't believe that this fresh little country kitchen used to look like this!

We put the house up for sale shortly after finishing the kitchen renovations - and it sold in 2 days, for double what we had paid for it 3 years earlier! We walked away from that home feeling very proud of what we had accomplished, and itching to do it all over again.