Time for another installment of the 10 year slow kitchen update! Haha but also, seriously that’s what we are doing. The footprint of our kitchen is great and we don’t plan on changing it but we have been updating appliances and finishes as needed/we have the motivation. Most recently it was…fitting a new fridge into a too small 60’s cabinet surround!
Yes we have been living with the refrigerator that came with the house when we bought it. I don’t have many photos because I tried to ignore it’s existence. The beige color no longer matched after we painted the kitchen white, but its most egregious offense was that it was too deep and stuck far into the kitchen. A counter depth fridge has been THE appliance update I’ve been waiting for. Old fridge:
The issue we ran into was that nearly every modern day counter depth refrigerator (that could reasonably house food for a family of four) was too tall for the existing opening we had, so we decided to reconfigure the top cabinet by raising it up a few inches. Because the new cabinet would look silly with squat swinging doors, we took the opportunity to add channels for colorful, pegboard sliding doors instead. And now I kind of want them everywhere.
Maybe the best part of the whole thing is that we had extra pegboard and went ahead and made 4 doors instead of 2 for mix and match color fun! The yellows are Dunn Edwards “Yellow Stone” and “Soleil,” and I kept the other 2 white for now but will likely add an orange panel to the rotation!
Now for the fridge…We searched long and hard for a fridge that had everything we wanted: counter depth, white, bottom freezer drawer, correct width, minimal design (no ice maker/etc on the doors). And came up with a total of TWO options. There was a Samsung with iffy reviews and this French Door GE refrigerator. Hoping it lasts a good, long time we splurged for the GE. I LOVE IT. There is a filtered water dispenser INSIDE that is my favorite refridgerator invention ever! Though we lost a considerable amount of cubic feet from our last fridge, our family of four has fit into the fridge portion just fine. The smaller freezer has been the an adjustment, though. It required some scaling back of frozen food groceries but I will totally trade that one inconvenience for everything else – especially no more large appliance butting into the middle of the kitchen!
I love the before/after on this room. It wasn’t bad before, just not our style. We are so thankful that it had good bones and a purposeful layout so that slow, smaller updates have eventually given us a kitchen we love without a full renovation.
If you are curious, we eventually plan to replace the counters, backsplash, sink, and cooktop but the old greige counter tiles have kinda grown on me and with the new fridge really classing the place up, I’m not in a hurry.
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