Big changes happened in our kitchen—well, one big change: we added a new exterior door. It may sound small, but replacing a window with a door has transformed how we use the space. In a previous post we shared photos of the new kitchen porch just outside the cooking area; here’s a look at what that change meant for the interior.
To appreciate how far this kitchen has come, here’s the “before” image from when we bought the house in February 2020. The layout, soffits, and dated finishes gave us a blank slate—one that we gradually shaped with smaller updates and strategic changes.
We documented our earliest updates back in May 2020 and followed with more recent posts detailing the pantry and other storage solutions. One of the top questions we heard was, “Why didn’t you just gut the kitchen before moving in?” The short answer is that we tackled changes step by step, prioritizing what would immediately improve function and storage while staying within our timeline and budget.
Today the kitchen feels completely different. Swapping the window for a door opened up a direct path to the porch and made grilling and outdoor dining so much easier. John grills multiple nights a week—chicken, shrimp, burgers, even pizza—and the door turned that routine into a seamless extension of our cooking workflow. It also made carrying groceries in and out faster and more convenient.
Before the door, the cabinets formed a short peninsula under the window. After careful measuring and planning (thanks to John’s practical calculations), we realized the net cabinet loss would be minimal—about 18 inches—once we accounted for the improved access to the previously blocked corner cabinet. By removing that peninsula, we gained a roomy lower cabinet and a drawer above it while freeing up the corner cabinet and drawer to be fully usable.
The porch itself is not a full outdoor kitchen, but it functions as one in many ways: a covered grilling area, extra seating, and a convenient place to stage food when we’re cooking. It changed the way we entertain and how frequently we cook outside—small structural changes can have outsized effects on daily life.
Another game-changing addition was the pantry we built into the kitchen. The new storage—three drawers and six shelves, including a cabinet over the fridge—gave us far more capacity than we had before. Between the pantry and restoring access to the corner cabinet, the kitchen now has ample, organized storage for everyday use.
With more drawers and shelving in the pantry and access to the restored corner cabinet and drawer, we actually have more storage than before. One of the new drawers by the door is even empty—a nice problem to have. That extra breathing room informed our choice to skip upper cabinets on the back wall and install two rows of thick wood floating shelves instead. The shelves, paired with a simple tile wall and brass-and-white sconces, give the kitchen an open, airy look while encouraging a simpler, less cluttered approach to storage.
Removing the cabinet under the old window required careful demo—mostly hammer and pry bar work—so we could reuse parts like drawer fronts and doors to create a new wider drawer and door for the exposed corner cabinet. There was a small patch of missing flooring under the original cabinets; because the house has plain pine floors, matching and feathering new boards in was straightforward. The contractors blended the new pieces so the patch doesn’t stand out.
I refinished the repaired pine with the same Bona finish we used when we refinished the floors originally, and it matched well. The seam of the laminate counter where we extended it after exposing the corner cabinet is the most visible clue that the room was once configured differently, but once we eventually replace the counters, cabinets, and tile the back wall, it will feel cohesive and intentional—like the kitchen was always meant to be this way.
We’ve ordered new cabinets for the back wall and plan to install them when the timing’s right. For now, the mauve cabinet color—Sherwin-Williams Artsy Pink—stays, and the plan is to carry that hue forward. The interim repairs and thoughtful reuse of materials allowed us to make meaningful improvements without a full teardown, and the result is a kitchen that works far better for our everyday life.
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