Kitchen Renovation - Important Lessons

I’m so excited to share photos of how our kitchen looks today… 8 years since our kitchen renovation! You can see “before” pictures by clicking here in case you missed last week’s post. Along with showing how our kitchen looks, I’m also sharing “5 Important Lessons Learned from our Kitchen Renovation” in today’s post.

Let’s get to the photos first:

1. Center view of our kitchen

From our living room, this is the view you will see first. The white cabinets definitely give the illusion that our kitchen is bigger than its actual size. The black granite top gives a nice contrast to the light cabinets. As far as the backsplash goes, it is still one of my favorite elements in our kitchen.

Like the yellow “Keep Calm and Dine Like Royalty” sign? It’s a ceramic plate that I painted at Color Me Mine. 🙂

Kitchen Renovation2 - Beauteeful Living

2) Right Side View

Since our kitchen is small, we could not have an “island” incorporated in our design. Instead, we settled on having a peninsula as our main “prep station.” It suits our needs perfectly!


Notice how much light we get from the sliding doors in our dining room. We added these sliders during this kitchen renovation project.

Kitchen Renovation3 - Beauteeful Living

3) View of our cooking area

Our kids love sitting on the saddle bar stools pictured here (bottom of photo). This is where they eat quick meals. When the kids get older, I’ll be looking to replace these stools. I bought them for practical reasons (soft and cushion-y for young kids). My style would’ve been a little more modern.

Kitchen Renovation4 - Beauteeful Living

4) Full view of kitchen

Although small, the layout of our kitchen is very functional since we renovated this space. We’ve got the “kitchen triangle” layout down pat —–> Refrigerator, stove, and sink are just steps from one another. 🙂

Kitchen Renovation5 - Beauteeful Living

5. Kitchen view of living room

With these “window” cut-outs, our kitchen has an open view of our living room. I love how our bay window lets in so much natural light into our kitchen!

Kitchen Renovation6 - Beauteeful Living

Now that you’ve seen  pictures of our kitchen in various angles, I’d like to share 5 Important Lessons from Our Kitchen Renovation:

Lesson 1 – Air should be vented “out” of house.

While we love our kitchen, the biggest regret we have is not having the stove fan vent to the “outside.” With the type of cooking that we do, having our microwave circulate the air (without venting to the outside) is insufficient. One of these days, we’d like a kitchen exhaust fan installed to replace our over-the-range microwave.

Lesson 2 – Dishwasher should be next to sink.

Instead of having the dishwasher installed right by the sink, we chose to have our garbage and recycling bins located there. In hindsight, it’s much easier to have the dishwasher closer to the sink so you can load dishes easier. No need to worry about dripping plates after rinsing them and transferring to dishwasher.

Lesson 3 – Put some thought into kitchen flooring.

Not enough attention is given to flooring. Having done flooring for our 2 bathrooms after our kitchen renovation, I have to say that flooring is SO MUCH more important than I originally thought. We purchased the tan square ceramic tiles in our kitchen for practicality reasons. With grooves on the tiles, we thought they would be less slippery for us and our pets. We’re not thrilled with the way they look these days. I definitely foresee our kitchen floors being replaced in the near future.

Lesson 4 – Deep cabinets should “pull out.”

Nothing is worse than having to dig far back into cabinets in order to reach for a needed item. With all the available cabinet options available nowadays, you should definitely consider “pull out” cabinets for areas that are hard to reach like spots that are high (ex. above the refrigerator). You may still need a stepping stool but you wouldn’t have to pull items out in order to see what’s hidden in the back!

Lesson 5 – You can never have enough cabinets or pantry space.

Even though on paper, it looks like you have way more cabinets than you’ll need, you will fill them all up in no time. Trust me on that. Do you have any idea how much space tupperware takes up? When in doubt, add another cabinet to your design plans (if you can).

Found these tips helpful? Please bookmark this page or “Pin” this post for future reference.

Kitchen Renovation Lessons - Beauteeful Living

I hope you’ve enjoyed this post. If you’re new to Beauteeful Living, please subscribe here to never miss a post or exclusive newsletter:

Is there anything in particular that you like most from the kitchen renovation we had done 8 years ago? Have a question or comment? As always, thanks for reading! XO, Tee.