Meet my wo' out kitchen

This kitchen has seen better days. I'm not sure where to even begin, and every time I start to think about it the plan changes. Making it more complicated is that they tried to put some lipstick on this pig and got new granite countertops for it. But you can't cover up the tired old wo' out kitchen with shiny new countertops.

  

You can't even tell that it's 23 years old, right? Ha ha. Those are my pictures. The pictures from the real estate listing are much more flattering.

First of all, don't look up. Shiny orange wood paneling on the ceiling. Yikes. Also, that monstrosity of a fluorescent light thing. Why did they think that was functional or attractive back in 1993? Note that it was not included in the pretty pictures done for the brochure. But just look at those countertops! Yeah, they're almost identical to the granite that we have in our current house and I am not a fan. I don't think it's ugly, I'm just not crazy about multi-colored busy looking granite.

Here's the next interesting tidbit about this kitchen. There is a built in oven/microwave combo AND a freestanding range/oven appliance. It's the best of both worlds! I don't know if I've seen this before, but if I did I never noticed it. It kind of sticks out here. I'm not really sure why.

So where are we going to start? Good question. The first question to answer is whether natural gas is available to our neighborhood. We don't know that yet. Everything in this house is electric, so I'm thinking that it's not available. This was probably a fringe suburban area when these houses were built, and they probably didn't run it out here. Then as everything else built up, it got overlooked for natural gas access. But I've got an email in to one of the gas companies, so hopefully I'll have an answer this week. If gas is available and it's not expensive to run it up to the house, we will do that and switch out the stove/ovens to gas. 

Other things on our list for the kitchen: 

- remove the uppers and replace them with cabinets that go all the way up to the ceiling.

- sand and paint the lower cabinets (they appear to be solid wood, so they're worth saving)

- new backsplash

- replace the freestanding range with a slide-in downdraft vented range (did I mention that there's no vent hood over the stove?)

- replace that microwave/oven piece with a new one

- new cabinet hardware

- get an electrician to wire for some pendant lights over the peninsula

- get that gigantic lighting thing off of the ceiling and find another lighting solution (probably can lights)

- prime and paint the ceiling

- paint the walls

- maybe one day we'll replace the countertops - and when we do we'll put in a new sink

- and maybe one day new flooring to replace the generic white tile

That's a big list. Who's coming to help?