Finished kitchen update

Finished! Well mostly finished. There's still the dryer venting issue to contend with and I have to buy frames for the Etsy prints I bought, but the big stuff is done.

Doug spent a whole Tuesday night putting the island together. It looks great and has some nice storage space for some of my baking pans. The top is maple and the whole thing is super sturdy. We're really pleased with it and we'll be able to take it with us if we move. It's given me so much more space for prepping and making.

The shelves we were going to make ended up not being made. On one of our (many) trips to Lowes we saw some pre-made shelves and just bought those instead. So they aren't DIY but they look good and I think they'll hold up pretty well.

The counter tops finally got installed and they're so nice and smooth as opposed to the tile we had before. It's a hundred times easier to clean them too since we don't have to dig into the grout. I love the under-mount sink, it's slightly deeper than our old one and holds more.

I couldn't find any curtains I really liked and after searching for inspiration on the internet I thought it would be neat to do cafe curtains. I bought the hardware at Target and used a fabric shower curtain, also from Target, for the fabric. The shower curtain was $20 and made the curtains for the window and almost fit the back door. I did end up about 4 inches short on the back door curtain, so I picked up some lace to sew at the bottom to make up for the missing inches. Still not bad for twenty-ish dollars. Plus if we get tired of the pattern we can just grab another shower curtain (Target has some really great looking and reasonably priced fabric shower curtains).

Our new dishwasher was the final installation piece and it came last week. It's quieter and more efficient than our old one.

All and all we are very happy with the way everything turned out. The dryer thing is obviously something we didn't plan for, even though the installer knew about it beforehand he didn't take the lazy susan in the cabinet into account, but it has been our only major hiccup. It was hard in the interim between the cabinet installation and the countertop/sink installation and I probably whined about it more than was necessary but we are both glad we did it.