Back when we bought our first house, I think back to how much work we needed to do and how much fun it was going to be getting to remodel every square inch of the place because it was ours. We had previously lived in a rental and you didn’t dare do too much to fix it up because that money wasn’t going to come back with you. Back when we were renting a home, it didn’t matter what condition things were in, fixing them up would be a waste of money since we didn’t own the house. When you finally own your own home, the freedom to do whatever you want is truly liberating. It can also be expensive.

Without a doubt, the kitchen was our biggest obstacle. The kitchen was so old the wiring was from 1930, old knob and tube and was very dangerous. It’s a good thing we weren’t using an FHA loan because they never would have approved it. I’m amazed the inspectors didn’t care, for some reason they made us put vinyl siding on the garage because that wasn’t finished, but they didn’t care at all about the disasterous and dangerous state of the kitchen.

We did a lot of research on various topics related to kitchen remodeling, especially stock vs custom kitchen cabinets because we were doing it ourselves and wanted to do it right the first time.

We gutted the kitchen down to the bare walls and rebuilt it from the ground up. That meant I got to pick out new kitchen cabinets, and any appliances we needed due to ours being a bit old. Let me tell you, designing a kitchen from the bottom up is harder than you’d think. We worked with the designers at Menards, who helped us consider appliance placement, traffic patterns, cabinet styles and sizes, and guided us to buy during the best sale so we could get a free sink base and a huge discount on the cabinets themselves. We even got down to the nitty gritty items like glass cabinet knobs and drawer inserts.

It was fun. I hope I don’t have to do it again for a while, and cooking in our living room was incredibly difficult. We did most of the work ourselves, actually I think we did all of it ourselves, even hanging the cabinets, so it probably took a little longer than if professionals were there. After eight years I still love it, plus it came out looking so nice!