For those of you in the Bloomington or Spencer Indiana areas, I thought I would revisit some of my past projects through a series of before and after articles…

If you watch any of the ‘makeover’ shows on television, you’ll notice that sometimes it’s more of a cosmetic change to a space with new paint or curtains.  This kitchen needed something more drastic.

The biggest change came from opening up the wall between the kitchen and dining area.  It was a small doorway that I widened by a couple more feet.  It wasn’t a lot of wall to remove, but the change really connected the dining nook to the kitchen and helped the smaller rooms in this older home to feel a little more spacious, while not drastically altering the character of the home.

Sometimes in a home like this you have to improvise, as I did to add a dishwasher next to the sink.  The change left a 12″ space next to the dishwasher where we decided to add a simple cabinet that I built from scratch (see this post).  It’s not fancy, but for this compact home the extra storage is great anywhere you can get it.

It’s fun to see a neglected home come back to life as this one did.  (See all the articles related to this project here)