Before & After: A Bright & Airy Kitchen Renovation

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Lindsay and her family moved into a wonderful new space in a neighborhood they loved. But there was one snafu: the old and outdated kitchen. Lindsay has a food blog so a clunky kitchen just wouldn’t do. They gutted the entire thing and started from scratch, and the results are a fun and functional space that’s perfect for family life and blog life.

From Lindsay: The biggest change we made was to the location of the sink and the removal of the existing island.

Based on the placement of the window, I really think this kitchen was originally designed as an L-shaped kitchen. I mean, why else would you have a window just that size at just that location if not to sit over the sink? I have a hunch that the architect designed it this way originally, then someone along the way decided that buyers want big islands (maybe they were watching too much HGTV?) so they stuck a massive one in the middle of the space. However it happened, I feel like we put it back the way it was supposed to be.

The new L-shape left plenty of open space for a more appropriately-scaled island, which we put together ourselves using some stainless steel legs from Etsy, topped with a beautiful piece of marble (my precious). I love how the open island gives us a ton of extra work space without feeling like a giant chunk in the space (seeing as we just took out a giant chunk, I didn’t want to put one right back).

While I would have loved to outfit the entire kitchen in marble, I knew that just wasn’t practical, seeing as how hard we are on our counters. So instead we went with a pure white quartz with a marble subway tile backsplash instead, plus the marble island (I’m going to embrace the fact that it will get etched and scratched and stained and be more beautiful because of it).

You can see many more photos of Lindsay’s kitchen update on her blog Love & Olive Oil.

Thank you, Lindsay!