Kitchen - before, the painful during, and after

I daydreamed about this kitchen redo all summer, through vacations and moving and all. I've always dreamed of having a kitchen we owned that I could redo, but when it came to actually doing it the decisions were much harder to make than I'd imagined - I wanted to do butcher block counters but they are too much upkeep and our kitchen doesn't get enough natural light for that dark of counters. Neither of us have ever like granite and all it's busyness, and we didn't want to drop the money for quartz as it's pricey and doesn't add value to the house, so we searched high and low for something that wasn't ridiculously expensive and decided to replace the nasty old formica counters with new ones. They are a budget update, for sure, and won't add value to the house other than the fact they are much better looking (minus the botched areas our contractors couldn't get to look right) than the older ones! I wanted cream cabinets up and down, but decided that four boys, my messy cooking and lower cream cabinets doesn't make sense - so I thought hard about what color would be best and decided that of all the colors in the world green makes me the happiest, so I went with green! We LOVE them! The knobs and pulls were fun to pick out and I think they tie the black sink (which we LOVE LOVE LOVE) and black faucet in beautifully. Overall, we are very happy with how it turned out visually, but we are pretty sure we'll have to redo the counters before selling, as our contractors promised big and delivered.....much less than was promised and never owned up for it, ended up putting a construction lien on our property and tried to charge us $400 more than we owed. Goodness. It was a good lesson in patience and graciousness. The lien has been lifted and we told them we'd pay the original amount. They pulled their claws back in and agreed to that. It's laughable, really. First world problem, to be sure.

The light.....thingy, up on the ceiling will come down and we'll put can lights in and install some pendants over the bar. Soon, hopefully, because that big ol' fluorescent light makes me twitch. And it's held together by scotch tape in many places! hahahaha!

Trying to get a feel for how far out bar stools would come into the room

ick!

I initially had ever intention of keeping this sink, but it just kept getting nastier and nastier, so I decided a black sink was in order, as white shows every spec of anything in it and constantly looks dirty

painting the cabinets was intense. Took a week for the uppers and a week for the lowers. I did the uppers before the counter guys came, took that week off (since it took them the entire week to finish the counters) and then did the lowers the next week.

so prettyyyyyyy

oh my goodness

wait, you guys said you do formica all the time!

are you kidding?!

they were serious when they said they felt like this blended in....

dusting before the final coat of laquer

all finished!

We were SO relieved to have it done, after a nearly 4 week timeframe. The contractors came back 3 times to try to fix the adhesive around the sink and once to rip off the old bullnose edging and try to reinstall new edging - those things are better, but still so much less than professional. But it looks better in here, for sure! (should have had them extend the counter over further on the right toward the window - gah - hindsight is 20/20)

I really love the green and black!

We've since installed (us, ourselves) a butcher block counter top on the left of the range and plan to update all the appliance with black ones this year some time.