The kitchen and family room comprise one long room. They both needed a lot of work. The kitchen cabinets were definitely showing their age and the countertops were a pinkish beige that had seen better days. We used wood putty to fill in all the cracks and painted the cabinets white. I had a gas pipe run into the kitchen and bought a dual fuel range ~ the burners are gas and the oven is electric [best of both worlds]. I am more of a two oven person than a microwaver, so over the range we installed a GE Advantium which can bake as well as microwave.
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The kitchen was a hodgepodge of styles. The far wall was rough cypress boards; the same on the back of the cabinet under the chairs. There was wallpaper on the back of the other cabinet facing the family room. We replaced the sliding glass doors [partially seen to the right] with French doors.
Another view of the old kitchen. The old floor [an Armstrong laminate] was actually very light, as in the picture under this one. My camera has a problem with colors.
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Close up of the rough boards [fortunately, they were added later, so were easy to remove] and a puttied cabinet readied for painting. The kitchen also had a yellow porcelain sink [colored fixtures were another feature of the 70s]. I don't like porcelain or colored sinks, so I replaced the sink with a good stainless steel double sink. Here is a picture of the kitchen in the midst of the remodeling. I have a weird camera and the colors never seem to come out right ~ or the same from one picture to the next.
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We used a medium green called Village Green for the kitchen/family room.  Here you can see the white cabinets and new black countertops. The old garden window over the sink was replaced with a more energy efficient one. The Pergo flooring is the same dark antique cherry used in the living room, dining room, hall and master bath. This picture shows the pantry that Neil, my son-in-law, built in some wasted space. In the picture to the left, you can see a glimpse of the new pantry before the doors were added. Neil removed the faux brick behind the stove [another 70's thing] and I added some white tile as a backsplash.
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The family room presented a mammoth challenge. It looked like a Chucky Cheese Pizza Parlor with an ugly brick wall at the far end that represented nothing more than wasted space. Neil removed all the brick around the fireplace and built bookshelves, storage cabinets and a mantel. He added tiles around the fireplace [we got rid of the ugly pot-bellied stove that stuck out from the old fireplace].
Here is what we had to work with. The previous owners added the window, but put it in much lower than the sliding glass doors. There are two garish stained glass windows on the other side of the window. Because of a huge rhododendron behind them, no light came in, so they were filled with insulation and covered with drywall.
A close-up of the fireplace wall, a huge area of wasted space, not to mention ugly.
The fireplace undergoing brick removal.
The new wall begins to take shape.
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And the final result. The new French doors have the built-in blinds. Because the window was lower than the doors, Neil added some bead board above it to make the window appear to be the same height as the doors. On the other side of the window were two different sizes of garish stained glass windows that were filled in and now a painting hangs there. Throughout the house, the beige light switches and outlets were changed out for white ones to match the trim and wainscoting. The same bead board used in the wainscoting and above the window is repeated under the fireplace, above the mantel and on the storage cabinet doors. David Dick, a friend who is an electrician, added recessed lighting above the wall.
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