We came home from work on Friday to discover much progress had been made in the kitchen. Actually, there's been a lot of other progress since my last renovation update -- but I've neglected to keep you updated!

So this week's progress:

This is the view from the great room into the kitchen. You can see the trayed ceiling. This used to be a large flourescent light fixture, as shown in this post. We plan to order 4-6 light pendant lighting for that area. Under it is the kitchen island, which holds the oven/stove. The tray was actually completed earlier this summer -- but I didn't share pictures at the time.

The biggest change this week is the faux crown moulding at the very top. As you'll see in the pictures from the old kitchen post, we had 12-inch soffits surrounding everything in the kitchen. We felt that the soffits made the kitchen look very dated. Granted, it was built in the 80's, so it didn't just LOOK outdated, it WAS outdated. But we felt that falsley extending the cabinets to the ceiling with the faux crown moulding would look more updated, and also be one of the easier fixes. The alternative would be to knock out the soffits and potentially raise the cabinets... or leave it open. But I've never been a fan of open-top cabinets, and raising the cabinets seemed an insurmountable (and very costly) task.

This is the view of the pantry (above photo) . Talk about awesome cabinet space, eh? You know those huge spice containers you buy at places like Costco or Sam's club? That's the depth of each shelf. It's so nice, because nothing gets lost or buried in the pantry. It's easy to stay organized -- or at least it would be if I attempted to do so! Anyway, the soffits above this bank of cabinets go into the stairs to the basement. This would have posed a different challenge if we wanted to eliminate the soffit completely -- opening the top really wasn't very possible, because I think it would have opened into the stair well.



And finally, this is the laundry room. It has all the same cabinets as the kitchen (the whole house does), but also has the same soffit. We thought it best to continue that "fix" into the laundry room. These look significantly lighter in the photo than the kitchen cabinets -- rest assured, they all match. The laundry room just happens to be better lit currently, due to the need for the island light in the kitchen. The laundry also has an old fluorescent light box, which we'll replace once we figure out what we want to use instead.

The biggest cabinet project now is to replace all the fixtures. We're not fans of the oak doors, simply out of personal preference for less striation in the wood. However, they're solid wood, and we just couldn't afford to replace them with anything that would be as high quality -- especially because literally we'll have over 100 door pulls to replace, when you consider that every cabinet in the house looks that way! So we'll just replace all of the pulls with something more contemporary, and we'll feel SO much better about our cabinets. We're definitely happy with how our new faux moulding looks! I was hesitant, but it turned out so good.

Lesson learned: trust Jon's design instincts.