Our Kitchen Reno | The Wet Bar revamped

I’ve stopped blogging about the kitchen reno because we are so close to done, but have put some things on hold as we get ready for the semester to start. I’ve got fabric dyed for curtains and want to get them hung before I gussy the kitchen up and take some primo “after” pictures. Plus…..I really want to get a new grey couch to replace the very old (the “we bought it from Sears 16 years ago, I’ve already recovered it once I hate it and won’t recover it again”) brown couch and get the colors properly in the grey zone. Oh, and make new pillows and quilts in fun blues too… So I really won’t have awesome pictures til then, LOL! But I will get some after pix up soon.

Most importantly, we are loving using the kitchen, all the choices we made were the right ones for us and improving our quality of life!

One change is our wet bar!

Here’s where it is located:

This is a picture after we had painted the family room and made everything as pretty as we could before a big party we had to give right BEFORE the kitchen reno had started. Andrew had already added upper cabinets and replaced an ugly brass square 80’s flush mount light with those 2 cute little halogen directional lights. But hiding behind that pony wall is this:

The “drawer” on the left was completely inoperable because at some point the sink must have been there (the plumbing for one is underneath). We shoved stuff in there as best we could, but really this whole area was just a giant catchall for stuff.

So after demoing the wet bar, Andrew built 2 huge shelves that are a few inches deeper than normal and repurposed the Ikea wooden counters we had used as our island top for the past 9 years. I made some linen curtains, we strung some wire behind the lip Andrew built and voila! Storage down below for all the really big and random things we use so infrequently, like canning pots and jars, candles, oh and 2 foundue pots and these really cool fondue forks:

The new cabinets up above hold liquor, all our wineglasses and other random nice glass vases etc…

And here’s that lovely linen curtain:

Look at all the stuff it hides!!!!

I know I haven’t used a lot of this stuff for ages, but partly that was because I couldn’t access it easily. Now that I can see stuff, lets hope I use it (so FONDUE PARTY will happen this year!!!!)

Another cool thing is that we had enough leftover matching Ikea butcherblock to change out the white painted shelf on top of the pony wall (you can see it in the first picture) with this bigger one. We are totally thinking ahead to the festival of pie and think this will make a great area to cool and store all the pies as we make them the day before Thanksgiving!

So, we’ll have to have a party before I know if we actually use this for anything close to what it was designed for. But as a pretty, easy accessible storage place it works great, and Logan has been using the counter as a place to draw his big cartoons, which is awesome too!