Kitchen remodel

When we bought our house in the summer of 2003, the kitchen had been remodeled just two or three years earlier.  Actually, it was re-muddled, in a bizarre mishmash of "craftsman" (ahem) and cutesy-country crapola, using the cheapest materials and while cutting every corner possible.  (The people we bought the house from told us the remuddlers had told them that it was done in "Frank Lloyd Wright style," and I do believe FLW turned over in his grave.)  Some walls were 1x10 boards covered with masonite.  The ceiling had been lowered from 10' to 8'.  The green plaid wallpaper was ripping from being stretched across wonky old paneling.  There was CARPET on the floor.  Basic ranch casing replaced oak moldings.  Skinny cove molding stood in as crown molding.  A giant fluorescent "bubble" fixture hung over the sink.  It was bad.  Actually, it wasn't THAT bad compared to lots of kitchens we saw when looking for a new home, but the thing was that someone spent money - recently - to make it look like that.  And it was such a poor fit for our grand old home.  It just made me sad.

We decided a couple of years ago to redo the kitchen.  Originally we were going to save the cabinets (which were of surprisingly decent quality, considering the other scary elements in the kitchen) since, if painted white, they would resemble the house's original cabinets.  We planned to keep the same footprint and fix the walls, replace flooring, lighting, countertops, etc.  But after talking with our friend/contractor, our plans somehow morphed into a grand scheme involving gutting 3 rooms and knocking out walls and restoring architectural details that had been pillaged from the place.  Quite an undertaking.  

Here we are, two years later, and have only a finished powder room and mostly-finished laundry room to  to show for it.  Work on the kitchen slowed to a crawl for many months, but after a couple more false starts, work is finally again in full swing.  We're optimistic that our kitchen's time has finally come! 

The original kitchen was roughly 10x14, with a large stove, a free-standing farm sink, and a single light fixture.  There was a pass-through pantry connecting it to the dining room (which once had a box beam ceiling, oak paneled walls, and twin china cabinets - but that's a story for another day), and another butler's pantry for storage.  During the demo, it was thought-provoking to see the outlines of the old, now-gone cabinetry on the walls.  

Here are a few pictures of our progress and the end goal.

SOUTH

WEST

NORTH

EAST

This is a floor plan of all the changes we've made/are making.  The powder room was once a closet, and the laundry room was the powder room and a side hall into the kitchen.  The pantry is close to the original closed-in pantry, and occupies most of what was a sewing room.  (The entrance to the sewing room was originally from the dining room.)

We borrowed about 2 feet from the dining room in order to enlarge the kitchen, and doing this allowed us to create a niche for a china cabinet and make the powder room a smidge bigger.  The dining room originally had two china cabinets flanking the doorway into the butler's pantry, but the one that is being rebuilt is coming directly from the blueprints.