| | |

What Happens When Your Contractor Walks Away Mid Renovation.

ByMelinda DIY, Kitchen & Bath Design, Kitchen organization, Kitchen Remodel
Most of the way through phase 1 upgrades

When we moved into our brand new home we ‘built’ with a very large home builder, we knew we were going to have to do a kitchen renovation. I use the term ‘built’ loosely, this is a bottom tier build where we got to make about 3 choices, countertops, flooring, color of the exterior, and we chose the upgrade to the kitchen cabinets, and the optional fireplace. It’s a 2500 square foot home with a 2 car garage, and 5 bedrooms and 3 full bathrooms. and a tiny kitchen with 3 access points, a tiny pantry and almost no counter space. Lets look back at the original, before we started the kitchen renovation.

The original kitchen with floescent light
original kitchen – you can see where the counters end by the dishwasher
And the original kitchen layout with 3rd doorway
looking into the original kitchen from the 3rd doorway
closeup of the original kitchen laminate countertops


Yes, they still put florescent lights in cheap homes. Bless. That was literally one of the first things I took out of this house. I absolutely could not. I chose the cheapest counter because they were all, well, ugly. We took care of that in phase 1. The tiny pantry and tiny amount of counter space were absolutely not going to work for our family of 7. The pony wall that could have been a breakfast bar, the opening to the dining room that wasn’t wide enough for the fridge door to open all of the way, the dining room light switch that we felt like really belonged on a different wall. There were so many things. And we moved into this home in February 2020. And I had a 7 week old, a 20 month old and 3 bigger kids.

PHASE 1 FIXES
When my mom was here for a visit, I enlisted her to help with a couple of “kitchen renovation” upgrades. They were high impact, low cost, mid level effort. We took off the counter on the pony wall behind the sink, put on a 1×8 and painted it white, it was still a stuff catcher, just a nicer looking one. We covered the counters in a vinyl, removeable product, which lasted the next 3 years because my mother is so incredibly good at making things as perfect as possible. I mean look at those corner and edges. The woman is a master. These kinds of products are normally advertised as lasting a year or so because of normal wear and tear.

Lighter and brighter with a vinyl product on the counters and a simple wood cap on the pony wall.
Partially done with extended phase 1 changes.
look at the detail work on these corner and edges.

THE NEXT PHASE OF PHASE 1 KITCHEN RENOVATION
So, I refuse to say this is a multi phase kitchen situation. It’s a phase one and then the final renovation. So the next step in the kitchen was to source matching cabinets. That took two years, no lie. But we did and then the contractor we hired ghosted us, after we demo’d our tiny pantry and he installed a very wonky wall. So I slapped some cabinets in on my wonky wall, and bought a counter from Home Depot and we lived like this for 3 years. We added shelves, and the new pantry, check out my other kitchen design posts for that one. I scoured every album I have everywhere and I have one picture, one, of the shelves I put over the counters here.

The temporary shelves that we installed
Galley kitchen, white cabinets, white vinyl covered counters, pony wall behind sink that faces backyard, the other end of the kitchen opens through a standard doorway into the dining room which has white walls white curtains, with holiday decor hanging from the ceiling and a table and chairs for a family of 7.
The very wonky wall job from the kitchen side
The very wonky wall from the living room side


THE MORAL
Simple changes like vinyl countertop covers and removing useless ‘bar tops’ can make a space liveable until you can do more. Sometimes you start a renovation and things go sideways. That’s life. Do what you can, we had a severely bowed wall, I installed cabinets and shelves on it anyway until we could figure out the actual fix.

Helpful links – some may be affiliate links

Vinyl countertop covers – peel and stick – removeable
Heavy duty shelf brackets
White kitchen shelves

Cheers!
Melinda

Similar Posts