Coming Soon: Our Kitchen + Family Room Renovation

Ever since we laid eyes on our house, we knew that we’d want to do some serious re-working of the back half of the first floor. The overall size is great, but the floor plan is choppy and the kitchen is cramped and awkward. It doesn’t function well for the way we live, yet we saw tons of potential. Well, the time has come to change that! We’re in the planning stages of a big renovation and are hoping to kick the project off once the kids are out of school this summer. We’ll also give our powder room and mudroom a bit of a refresh while we’re at it.

Fun fact: this 1920s house was originally built as a duplex, so one of the units had two bedrooms on the first floor that shared a Jack-and-Jill style bathroom. Previous owners have used those for different purposes, including a first floor master + office, and a family room + guest room. Our family of four occupies the bedrooms upstairs and we have a powder room off the kitchen, so we don’t need more bedroom and bathrooms downstairs.

In order to create a flow that works for how we live and entertain, we have plans to combine those bedrooms and their adjoining bathroom into a family room and have it be open to the kitchen. There will be a small workout room at the very end of the space as well that uses up the last little bit of the far bedroom.

The kitchen itself will stay in the same general area it is now, but will be reconfigured significantly. Once you see the photos, you’ll get a sense of how there’s really no way to make it better without removing some walls.

Today I wanted to share the before photos of the space we’ll be renovating. Next week, I’ll share the general space plan and some inspiration photos for the style and feel - particularly of the kitchen. Spoiler alert: it’s looking somewhat reminiscent of the kitchen refresh we did in our old house - at least in terms of color palette!

Let’s walk through the back half of the house as it looked when we toured it with previous owner’s furniture and decor - starting with the kitchen.

When you walk in from the front room, this is the main workspace. It has some funky angles to provide a walkway through to the powder room and mudroom, and out to the driveway. It’s also a terrible layout for two cooks! We bump into each other all the time.

Turning around to face the front of the house, you can see the fridge and breakfast nook, as well as a pantry beyond the fridge. The pantry situation is super weird and has a lot of wasted space as it’s currently configured - I can’t wait to see that go away. The refrigerator is moving to a new location and a second small pantry will be eliminated from that area as well.

We currently eat just about every meal at the breakfast nook if it’s just the four of us, but we’re getting rid of that to create a larger kitchen space. We’ll have an island for seating instead!

Here’s a view of the sink wall. In the new plan, the sink will stay under these windows - it’s just about the only thing that will stay the same! There’s currently a radiator under the sink, which inhibits a lot of functionality to its right. That’ll be going away with the reno, and we’ll add a pullout trash can to that spot instead.

Let’s head down the back hallway past the basement stairs (the door that’s open in the photo), which will be eliminated in the reno. I know that sounds crazy, but don’t worry, we have another access point to it! We don’t use the basement apart from mechanicals and storing things like Christmas decor, so we are happy to get rid of these in favor of a better layout overall.

To the right you pass what was being used as a first floor guest bedroom, which will become part of the family room.

Then at the end of the hallway, you enter what we affectionately call “the green room.” Creative, aren’t we?! You can see a peek of the Jack and Jill bathroom here that sits between the guest bedroom and the green room.

The previous owners used this as a living room, and we’re planning to use a portion of it for the family room and then the last part of it as a workout room. There will be a new wall dropped down between those two windows in the photo below.

Here’s one more view of the green room looking toward what will become the workout space.

Heading back out into the hallway, you can see the kitchen sink straight ahead.

Now imagine you’ve down the hallway to the kitchen and taken a left. Once you’re through the kitchen and are heading all the way to the back of the house, that’s where you’ll find the powder room and mudroom. The powder room is through the wood door that has W.C. on it.

This will basically stay the same, but we’re going to refresh it and make some small tweaks to improve the function and style.

Finally, the mudroom! This is a workhorse in our house, but it’s a general mess right now without the right storage. I cannot wait to add some built-ins and a good set of hooks for coats back here. It’s also the only access to the backyard, so guests walk through here constantly, which is an incentive to make it functional and pretty. We can do better than wire shelving like we have now!

So that’s a peek into the big project! My husband and I talk almost daily about how much this renovation is going to change the way we live in our house. We feel like we’ve kind of put decorating the rest of the house on pause until this is done, so it’s going to have a huge downstream effect on other spaces as well! I can’t wait to take you along on the journey. Stay tuned for the inspiration photos and some kitchen plans in the next couple of weeks!