The journey begins...

A little while ago I hinted that I had a big project I was working on. Well, I thought it was about time to let you all in on it. Several months ago Jo and I were contacted by Mike at Greentea Design who was interested in an ad on the blog. I was stoked about this because I had seen their timber, Asian-style kitchen cabinets before and thought they were fantastic. I thought about how horrible my existing kitchen was and a lightbulb went off – why not see if they’d sponsor a kitchen reno project?!?! And what do you know – they went for it!!! They agreed to supply me with the cabinets I needed, and in return I would blog about my kitchen renovation (most of which will be included on a new blog) from planning down to the finished product. A pretty decent tradeoff considering this is what I was working with:

(I had to use an old photo here because I know some of you will be sad to see the kitchen - as it is now - go in the dumpster).

I have never done a kitchen renovation before so this is all new to me and I am SO EXCITED about it. The guys over at Greentea have been so amazing to work with and are so unbelievably helpful to me. It’s been a bit tough with them based in Toronto and me being in Ottawa – so we have only had a couple phone conversations, MANY emails and unfortunately, I haven’t had the chance to see their products in person. Despite this we’ve made really good progress since the beginning.

Along the way I’m hoping to get some advice from our readers on decisions I have made or need to make, and hopefully they will help me with this and future kitchen renovations, and our other readers as well. Also, the folks at Greentea are hoping to get some feedback on their products and some of the features they have to offer on their website to assist potential kitchen renovators in making their choices. So I’m hoping you’ll leave tons of comments.

As I mentionned, I will be blogging my way through the entire renovation. You’ll see the plans we came up with, choices of appliances, countertop, backsplash and lighting. You’ll witness the demolition of the lovely existing cabinets, the flooring installation, the plumbing and electrical involved, cabinet arrival and installation, and decorating. I will be taking many photos along the way.

I thought to begin this process, I’d start off with some photos of my kitchen as it exists today, pre-renovation. Actually, I’ll even start with a couple photos of what the kitchen looked like before I moved in (the first 2) and when I took possession of the house in December.


As you can see, it was pretty awful, and soooo boring. It was difficult to spend any length of time in it. So one day, I went to my local Benjamin Moore store and decided, since I would eventually be getting a new kitchen, that I would go a little crazy with the cabinets and paint them pink. The backsplash was a terrible sort of terracotta brown colour so I found some semi-gloss white paint I had and painted the backsplash. Amazingly, it’s held up really well.


Next time I will show you some of the ideas I had with some not-so-good drawings I made up to send to Greentea, and some of the reasons why I was so desperate to get rid of this kitchen in place of something utterly fabulous.