Pictures of our kitchen remodel

Hi all,

I just finished a DIY make-over of our original Eichler kitchen, and I wanted to share some pictures with you all.

When we bought our house in 2002, I have to admit that I was not immediately in love with the gold-speckled formica countertops, the swing-out table, and the sliding doors. This is how our kitchen looked like when we bought our house. It had been painted white, and the original sliding doors had been replaced by flimsy wooden panels.

I was very tempted to rip out the kitchen and replace it completely. Luckily, by reading this forum and other great Eichler websites, I quickly started to appreciate the value of having an original kitchen. The more Eichlers I saw with "country-style" kitchens, the more determined I was to keep our original cabinets. In the mean time, we did replace the fridge and dishwasher, and we will replace our oven in the immediate future (none of these were the original ones when we bought our house), but our cooktop is still the original from 1959!

We wanted to keep our cabinets, but we also wanted a more modern look. So I decided to strip all the paint and to stain the wood black. It was almost like traveling back in time, when I removed all those paint layers, and got to to see all the colors that had been used to paint our kitchen (white, green, light brown, yellow, and finally the original dark brown with white speckles).

Since the sliding doors were not the original ones anymore, we replaced them by semi-see-through acrylic plastic ones. We put small door handles on them to make them easy to open. We did all the work ourselves (except the cutting of the acrylic doors), and the total remodel has cost us about $ 750 (the acrylic doors took out most of the budget at $ 500). Here are the pics of our new kitchen, which is ready for the next 50 years!