There’s been a big change in our kitchen — well, big enough to feel like a new hole in the house. Technically it’s just a new door, but it has totally shifted how we use this space. Our last post showed the kitchen porch we added outside — just steps from the cooking area — so here’s what changed inside.
To rewind a bit, here’s how the kitchen looked when we bought the house in February 2020:
We shared our early updates back in May 2020 and wrote a more recent post about the pantry and why we didn’t completely rip out the kitchen before moving in. Those posts explain the timeline and the decisions that led to this point.
Here’s a similar view today. Installing the door truly transformed how we use the kitchen. John grills most weeknights — chicken, shrimp, burgers and even pizza — and now having direct access to the porch makes grilling so much easier. He’s become obsessed with the grill (nearly tied with his miter saw for favorite tool). I’m also planning to try baking chocolate chip cookies on the grill soon, so that should be fun to test.
Before the door, the short run of cabinets under the window created a peninsula that blocked access to a corner cabinet. John did the math and found that after converting space and opening the corner cabinet we actually only lost about 18″ of usable cabinet space overall.
That area to the right of the dishwasher became a wide lower cabinet with a drawer above it (26″ wide), so we gained that space while losing the 44″ peninsula — hence the net 18″ difference.
The payoff is this porch. It’s not a full outdoor kitchen, but it’s an incredibly useful extension: easy grilling, covered seating, a quicker way to bring in groceries, and more flexible outdoor living.
We also added a full pantry to this kitchen, which drastically increased our storage. That, along with freeing up the corner cabinet, changed how we operate in here. Between the pantry’s 3 new drawers and 6 shelves (including the cabinet over the fridge) and the previously blocked corner space, we now have a lot more organized storage.
One of the drawers by the new door is even empty — having extra space feels surprisingly luxurious. That was a big reason we chose open floating wood shelves on the back wall instead of upper cabinets. Cabinets would hide more stuff, but our goal is to downsize and simplify rather than cram more into the kitchen. We can always add upper cabinets later if we need more storage, but for now the tile-and-thick-wood-shelves look works great.
We removed the cabinet that blocked the door as carefully as possible, mostly using a hammer and pry bar, and saved the drawer and door fronts from the demo. That allowed us to create a new, wider drawer face and door for the exposed corner cabinet. There was a patch of missing pine flooring under the old cabinets, but matching pine was easy to source and our pros feathered the boards so the patch blends seamlessly with the existing floor.
I matched the finish with the same Bona sealer we used when we refinished the floors, and it blended in nicely. You can barely tell where the old wood ends and the new boards begin — exactly what we wanted.
The drawer and door fronts we assembled from salvaged pieces turned out great. With careful filling, sanding, priming and paint, you can’t see the seam where we joined two drawer fronts and two doors into wider faces for the end cabinet.
We’ve already ordered new cabinets for the back wall — they arrived but are waiting in the bedroom for now. We paused the full renovation after a tough family loss and haven’t yet removed the sink and dishwasher to install the new units. If we move forward with the replacement, the plan is to keep the same mauve color because we love it.
You can spot the seam in the laminate counter where we had to extend it after exposing the corner cabinet. It’s the only visible hint of the temporary work, and once we replace the counters and cabinets and tile the back wall it should look like it was always meant to be this way.
Update: After finishing the cabinet and backsplash overhaul, we shared the full renovation before-and-after and the budget in a dedicated post. The final result feels cohesive and finished.
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