Before and After: White and Wood Kitchen

These are all befores.

I have always wondered how adult humans do things like renovate kitchens. I’ve had kitchens! Owned them, even! The first one was beyond quirky but I loved it and I did exactly nothing to it, because it hadn’t yet occurred to me how one might go about renovating a kitchen were one not, say, a Getty or similar (the answer is that you take out a home equity line of credit, but nobody, apparently, learns things like this in school; I had never even heard of such a thing until the ripe old age of 37 when a friend mentioned in passing that she had used hers to get her boobs done – which, yes, is a thing you can also do and a thing that mayyyyybe I did, too).

(BTW, you can find a rundown of many of my absolute favorite home renovation projects here. There are some gooooood ones.)

The second kitchen I approached with my very most ramshackle tendencies. By which I mean I spent as little as humanly possible with zero regard for the longevity of my improvements. I (or, rather, the people I hired at a VERY low price because this definitely was not their primary skill set, hence the results) painted the hideous dark particleboard cabinets white without removing them first. This resulted in having the hinges painted white as well and the interior of the doors left dark, but truly, I did not care. I replaced the knobs with CB2 ones because I hadn’t yet realized that what you do about fixtures and such is find the ones you like on fancy websites and then search for their fraction-of-a-price doppelgängers on Amazon. I also DIY-ed a Frankenstein of a kitchen island using my friend Alisa’s marble remnant and some pipes I picked up at Home Depot…which, sure. It was fine.

There was a third kitchen, but all I can say about that is that I was having a pink moment. I do love it, but I also worry slightly about how it will affect resale given that I am currently attempting to sell that place. (On another Adulting note, did you know that you can get surprise bills to the tune of thousands and thousands of dollars for supplemental taxes, and you can get them really very frequently? Me, neither. Until now, whee!)

Which brings me to this kitchen.

I love the house that we’re in now. I have a side hustle – which is a term you could technically apply to virtually all of my present jobs – doing marketing for the fancy mobile home parks that are dotted around the Malibu area, which has given me both an understanding of the pros and cons of buying a manufactured home and a heads-up on properties that might be a good buy. So when this house popped up for literally half the price of my condo, I jumped.

It was an excellent buy because it’s in a community that hasn’t yet become popular enough to have prices even close to those you’d imagine based on the location, and is full of kids and fun amenities that I don’t have to personally take care of (no more scooping deceased chipmunks out of swimming pools for this lady right here, thanks!). It has a fenced-in outdoor area so that I can skip walking Archie when I don’t want to (which is often) and a garden that I’ve filled with tomatoes and wildflowers.

Check out my other favorite room in this house here.

But the kitchen had to go. It truly did; it was part-dusty blue and part-olive green and part-ecru and the butcher-block countertops were so old that they were cracked and bent upwards in parts. The refrigerator was on its last legs, the dishwasher straight-up didn’t work, and there was no microwave. But since I am not, as of this writing, a Getty, I ended up going for half-ramshackle and half-glam – by which I mean I cut corners wherever possible by hiring a contractor who understood my limitations, but also called up my genius interior designer friend Audrey Scheck to advise me on things that actually would make a difference in terms of quality, like the island light fixtures and the gorgeous Zellige tiling.

Reveal coming…

now!