Of all the rooms in the house, the kitchen area was by far the biggest change...and also the most work. I think most kitchen remodels are, though, because of the plumbing, exhaust, electrical, and basically the room's furniture is attached to the walls.
We started with a teensy galley kitchen tucked behind a ginormous and fugly fireplace that took up about 1/2 of what is now the kitchen. Because the house is not big (totaling about 1800 square feet, 900 on each level) we knew we wanted to do an "open concept" for the living/dining/kitchen area to maximize the small upstairs for both family time and also entertaining.
We have people over a lot and we've learned for certain that they always congregate around a kitchen island or bar, so for this remodel we planned for a big one. The finished kitchen island is about 8 feet square and is literally in the middle of the upstairs cooking/living area.
I'm going to illustrate this room step-by-step because it required so much work...
This is how the kitchen looked when we bought the house, missing cabinet doors and all. I guess in the '70's is was grooviest to not have to watch your old lady do the cooking? Now days with cooking as an important part of family time (and dinner parties!), it made sense to bust out the fireplace and make it all open.
So, bye-bye fireplace wall...
...and hello open-plan kitchen!
Next came ripping out the cabinets and flooring, new sheet rock, rebuilding the soffitt over the window (which conceals the sewer vent to the roof) and rewiring the electrical to make sense for our new appliance and island layout. (All of our sheet rock was done by Eric at Denali Painting and Drywall).
The cabinets. Because we're intending to do a "slow flip" on this place, we were just going to install the "in-stock" cabinets from Home Depot, however it turns out that they aren't actually in stock in Alaska (something they didn't tell me until I'd already paid for their kitchen measurement service). Of course. So we had this 3-day window when we needed to get the cabinets in and by a miracle of good timing, I found these floor model cabinets for sale on Craigslist by Builder's Bargains in Wasilla. The set ended up fitting perfectly, they were the style we liked, already came with stainless steel hardware and they could deliver them the next day. The best part, though, is that we couldn't have afforded these beautiful, solid-wood cabinets new, so it felt like a score even though we're still paying them off...
Next came the gorgeous concrete countertops which Jim did himself (with some help from his brother and a friend). We went with black dye for the island and no dye, e.g. natural, for the wall L-shaped counter. Jim ordered plastic countertop forms from ZFrames and used those to pour directly in place. The whole process made a GIANT mess (I think I hyperventilated at one point) and I don't recommend pouring inside (as opposed to pouring elsewhere and transporting a slab into place after its cured) unless your house is already a construction zone.
The counters were poured over this super deep stainless undermount sink (the second one we've bought, the first was an identical one in our last house) from Krauss. Because the window handle is so low we couldn't do one of those tall swoopy modern faucets that are so popular, we had to go with a shorty model and there are not many modern-looking shorty faucets. But, I searched high and low and finally found this Italian-made one that is so pretty and fits nicely.
Next, we did some back splash tiling with mosaics of quartz and glass and installed some new stainless steel appliances. The fridge is from Home Depot, the dishwasher from Lowe's and the slide-in range is from Allen + Peterson, which I cannot recommend highly enough to locals - they beat every price in town and price matched to national online sale prices when I went in to browse their ranges. I also ended up buying our washer and dryer there.
Then came this SS and glass range hood (Alaskans cannot beat the free shipping via Amazon Prime - we brought our heavy sink and this very large boxed range hood up this way and probably saved about $500 in shipping costs.) The light fixtures are handmade by an artist in Israel. I also found these on Etsy after weeks of searching, and the first batch broke in the mail but she quickly sent a replacement. They are gorgeous in person.
Lastly, here is the finished product with flooring (click any photo to enlarge)...
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