Great job!

Enjoy your new kitchen what a wonderful transformation!

great job!!!!!

Very open and airy! Did you add under cabinet lighting as well?

Fabulous...what a difference!

Wonderful job! Smart decision to live with what you had and take time to plan out something that works for you.

wow wow WOW!!! Simply FANTASTIC!!

Can you share how much (ballpark) it cost to get to "after?" My kitchen is almost identical to your "before."

I have the same layout for my kitchen. House build in 1958. Yours is much cheerier, but I am waiting for new lighting and counter-tops. Plan to put the refrigerator back further and other things.

Fabulous!

Hot bacon grease. I clean my backsplash for the reason that it gets filthy. I'll give the island cooktop a miss.

Looks great and I like the backsplash! Enjoy it! :)

I hope you have installed under cabinet lighting.. the can lights aren't enough for this area

I love the counter color with the white cabinets :)

You did a fantastic job on your kitchen!

sweet!

What did you do with the old cabinets? I'll be right over with a Home Depot truck to pick them up!!! I would kill to have them. Really, I'd love to get them if you still have them.

Much better flow, workablity and open feeling. Taking out the cabinets over the raised bar, moving the base cabinets over to make room for proper placement of the dishwasher, and keeping the counter at same height added so much visually, without the expense of reconfiguring plumbing and electrical. Great bang for the buck!

954donnah, they can use the beautiful vent hood, that's what it's for. A little trick we use in the south, screen covers for your fry pans, keeps the spattered down, greatly. Never fry without them!

This is beautiful! Great work!

Well done!

Looks great. It's amazing how much the feel of the room changes when you remove the upper peninsula cabinets. Good work

@phalagen- glad to share, the kitchen cost was (approx) ~25k, these are semi-custom wood cabinets, granite counter tops, hardwood floors, and that is including install and appliances. The fridge is counter depth because of the doorway placement to the kitchen. Also, there are unique features in the cabinets such as spice racks, the garbage can, pantry drawers, etc. We purchased the hood online separately, and got a great deal on the double oven which was a floor model. Because of the age we had to have all the electrical totally brought up to code and the electrical panel needed an additional mini-panel to accommodate this, so that was a significant cost.
@cjinhouston- right with you on the screen covers for fry pans! we use it all the time. Also, the larger burners are in the front and we splurged for the larger cook top, so hardly any grease ends up anywhere but the cook top itself. That and the hood is phenomenal!
@allenvaughan- Actually maybe this picture does the cabinets TOO much justice! They were totally custom, maple pieced together and screwed right into place, with random shelving, but the wood was recycled/repurposed by our contractor.

thanks for your response! cheers to you and to your new space ; )

Wow this look great. My kitchen is about the same layout. How big is your kitchen? What are the dimensions?

Your new kitchen looks great! Very nice.

Very nicely done! One question: do you miss the bank of cabinets you took down for the hood?

I love it. Hopefully you found a good home for the green appliances. Someone quirky somewhere probably would pay oddly good money for them.

Another original kitchen that could have been updated and was replaced with a boring ikea/home cheapo model. Wasteful, wasteful...

Congrats on your beautiful kitchen!

Great job! Looks very functional and clean. Love the extras like the spice racks and the chalkboard wall.

Very beautiful renovation. However, you had a very nicely configured kitchen to work with to begin with, which made it easier, not like the tiny, badly arranged kitchen in my condo.. I love the look of your new kitchen.

It's better, not ideal with the oven next to refig. It now has work harder the refig. I would've put it where the black board is located. All hot there.

Good point.. nothing that produces heat should be next to the fridge.

Love the old cabinets. While the new layout is an improvement and the new kitchen is lovely, it is now rather generic. It makes me sad that the old cabinets weren't repurposed into the new layout.

@happyleg and others.... as an engineer this hurts my brain that people don't understand thermodynamics and heat transfer. Appliances are made with insulation. The fridge will work no harder do to the oven being near it. No harder than it will with the heat on the house, they are designed this way. Also an oven will also be insulated properly and unless you have your fridge door and oven door open at the same time for a long period of time there is no concern about them working to compensate for the other.

@ everyone questioning the cabinets, please, you really have no idea what the cabinets were made of or the condition they were in. Go to home depot, buy some thick maple sheets of plywood and screw a bunch of random shelves into it and you will have our old cabinets. I'm sure they are serving well as scrap pieces somewhere, maybe being used craftily.

Why do people comment when they have nothing nice to say, I don't waste my breath on what I don't like, I focus on what I do like. :: end rant::

Nothing generic about that kitchen that's for sure, lots of custom touches with the wine racks, glass inserts, chalk board...etc etc. I think you did a fantastic job, those cupboards were way past their expiry date. My favorite is how you did the chalk board with the storage above, well done!

Hi Kate. My comment about the older cabinets was not meant to be taken as a slam on your new kitchen, by no means. I'm busy restoring a 1960 A-frame back to its MidCentury glory, and that includes finding original bathroom and kitchen pieces that: A) Are in good condition, and B) work well, ergonomically speaking. So often times, regrettably, there is poor forward looking planning with a kitchen's layout, and good money is wasted on poor design. As an engineer, I'm sure you're confronted with that kind of sloppiness from management trying to cut corners! At the same time, however, just be aware that there are some folks that will look askance at a post-post-post modern kitchen such as yours, housed withing a home that was built in the 1950's. Not that everybody HAS to live in a museum... that's ridiculous. But, a healthy respect for the architecture and what was good forethought in its layout and construction, might be reconsidered in updating a home. My dad, a NASA engineer, and good friends with the late Gus Grissom in particular, but friends with many of the Origianal Seven and the "New Nine" astronauts, went to the Jaguar dealership, bought a Jag hood ornament, and stuck the darn thing on the front of his Ford F-150 pickup! He loves it, but to everybody else, it looks stupid as heck!! As for me and my project, I'm getting really anal about the dates on the toilet, the bathroom sink and the tub, and making certain that the bathroom looks as if it were from the late 1950's. The kitchen is another challenge! I would've loved to have had a crack at your old cabinets, as they would've fit perfectly inside a lake house on Lake Lanier! BUT, and it's a big one, they'd have to work within an ergonomically sound environment. Anyway, I hope this has beguiled you of your frustrations with folks commenting on your kitchen. It looks nice to me.

Your kitchen looks great!

Kate - Congratulations on your new kitchen. I admire anyone who is brave enough to subject their home to scrutiny. There are so many comments on houzz to the effect that people wish they could see "regular" kitchens. Now we have one and still the lamenting. It's one thing to critique and offer advice when someone asks a question but when a job is done and the actual homeowner is proudly showing off their home, really what is the point?

Very pretty. I really like everything you have chosen. Do you happen to remember the name of the granite?

This looks great! I am living in a 1957 Ranch with it's original kitchen. Even the flooring is original! We inherited it and have been working on other areas first. I like that you took your time deciding what needed to be changed, I am sure you will have fewer regrets and "should haves". I have been wavering between keeping the upper cupboards above a peninsula because I desperately need the storage, or downsizing my dishes and glasses and such to allow the airy look when cupboards are removed. Do you miss the storage?

@ Sheri, the granite was called "Ghibli" but I don't know if they carry it at home depot anymore. We did find that granite was very affordable compared to marble and quartz now, and this kind has a lot of "movement", I truly love the details in it.

@loveswaterfalls, we do not miss the upper cabinet storage, but mostly because we replaced the old spice cabinet with the pull outs, the middle upper cabinet had the vent ductwork inside, and we put the large pantry to the right if the fridge that more than makes up for the lost storage, even a pantry half the size would work well!

The kitchen is lovely, and I'm sure it is a joy to use and will be for years with the care taken in planning and implementation and efforts to select quality materials. That said, I'm also going to make a plea to all those out there who want to "update" a vintage home to consider salvaging materials when they are in good condition. You may not like them (and no one says you have to), but some of us actually DO like old houses with unfashionable fixtures...odd but true... and we are trying to restore them and would really love to have the opportunity to get our hands on original cabinetry that was in the condition shown in these pictures. And just for the record, the boxes for much of the today's cabinetry of good quality is exactly what was described as being removed...sheets of plywood with veneer. In most cases the difference in quality and cost between grades of good cabinets is how thick the plywood box is, and how the doors and drawers are built. Lesser quality cabinets are of some type of pressed-board material (which you'll not find in 1950s cabinets, by the way). Plywood is very strong and resists warping, which are 2 goods reasons why they started using it for cabinet boxes in the second half of the 20th century and have continued to do so to this day. I'm not trying to say there were not shoddy cabinets built in the 1950s, but that was less likely to be the case then than it will be today unless you buy carefully. So I'll close this sermon by reiterating 1) shop carefully, and 2) salvage!

Great job!

Most everyone is happy you're happy. Your new kitchen is beautiful. For the record, I have a similar modern kitchen and have been known in Houzz comments to suggest modernizing "granny" features.

That said, the original kitchen as photographed is not "totally hideous" to everyone. The original cabinets seem to have had a beautiful patina and finish with the period-appropriate plywood for the cabinet boxes. Frank Lloyd Wright used plywood though he probably didn't design your original kitchen. It looks like a kitchen where I'd want to put on a vintage apron and get going on an apple pie, something I do in my up-to-the-minute kitchen anyway. (I temporarily lived in a rented home built in the forties and totally fell in love with its linoleum, steel banded counters!!!!!--the most indestructible, easy-to-clean surface ever. The owner hunted down forties hardware for the excellent wood cabinets. It was my fav kitchen ever even though the one I have now looks a lot like yours.)

People who said they'd love your original cabinets weren't being unkind. This is a forum to share all kinds of reactions and tastes. Those who love the style of the fifties, with great materials and design, remind us that there's a whole other population of people who love old houses and work with the bones of a good one.

What a wonderful transformation! Great job!

Kate great job on the transformation. Disregard the ignorant comments people make of oven next to refrigerator. I did mine see pictures attached and judging from your post date we completed around the same time. Yes the old kitchen was decent but it was not functional and efficient and the new one for us is so much more better. True it will feel like a waste to some to change but it is your decision and as long as you like that's what matters. But do realize this is an open forum and will get people sometimes saying things from their perspective.

For us it was simple upgrade or buy a new house that is outrageously expensive and mind you get nothing close to what I got from my renovation.

One more point I chose long handles with shaker and feel that it looks totally fine so does yours.