Our Kitchen Sink Woes + Our Small Kitchen Reveal

**paint is “Repose Gray” by Sherwin Williams. 

SHOP OUR SMALL WHITE AND GOLD KITCHEN

SINK REPAIR: Berkey’s via HomeAdvisor  //  GOLD SINK FAUCET: Kingston Brass  //  GOLD CABINET HARDWARE: Amazon  //  CUSTOM KITCHEN CABINETS: McDowell Contracting  ///  CUSTOM GRANITE: McDowell Contracting  //  CUSTOM BACKSPLASH: McDowell Contracting  // ROUND WOODEN TRAYS: Grandin Road //  TEAL RUNNER RUG: c/o At Home Stores  //  WHITE CANDLE HOLDERS: At Home Stores  //  WOOD SHELF: Pier 1 Imports  //  ROUND KITCHEN TABLE: At Home Stores  //  TEAL KITCHEN CHAIRS: At Home Stores  //  CORAL TABLE RUNNER: At Home Stores  //  BLUE AND WHITE BOWL:  similar Anthropologie  //  CHECKERED TEA POT: MacKenzie-Childs  // CHECKERED STOCK POT: MacKenzie-Child  //  PAINTED CAKE STAND: MacKenzie-Childs  //  CHECKERED BOWL: MacKenzie-Childs  //  COLORFUL ANIMAL MOTIF PLATES: Anthropologie

As you probably know, Cole and I bought our first home just over a year ago and completely gutted + renovated it (you can check out our living room reveal here!). Owning our own home has been so amazing, but one of the things we quickly learned is how costly, time-consuming and unexpected home repairs can be when you’re a home owner. No longer can we simply call up our landlord and request services…we’re all on our own, and the fact that we poured so much time and money into making our house a home makes those unexpected home repairs sting all the more. Such was the case when we found out we had a leak in our kitchen sink earlier this summer. After moving in, we’d purchased a brand new sink, faucet and all of the other things that make a sink work that I’m not qualified to know the names of, so I couldn’t understand why we were already having issues. But with a baby who goes through multiple bottles, bowls and spoons a day plus potential water damage that was accumulating in the cabinet below our sink (which was also brand-new), timing was of the essence. Luckily, HomeAdvisor was there to save the day!! After taking their quick online survey addressing our exact issue, I received quotes and reviews from local services that could instantly fix our sink issues and in no time our sink issues were resolved!

Click through to learn more about why we’ll forever be using HomeAdvisor when it comes to home repairs, and see our small white, gold and grey kitchen space reveal for the first time, complete with before-and-after photos, plus some space-saving tips in case you need any small kitchen design ideas.

PS – scroll to the bottom of this post to see what the kitchen looked like before we renovated it (it was a little scary y’all!)

Our Experience Using HomeAdvisor For Our Kitchen Sink Repair

As you can see from the above photos, our sink is brand new. When we moved into our home, the kitchen was in major need of some love (scroll to the bottom of this post for before photos!!), so we decided to just completely gut the appliances and cabinets and start fresh. I absolutely loved how it turned out (keep reading for more about that!) Flash forward to early June of this year and suddenly, the water from our kitchen sink simply stopped flowing. The only way I could get any water to flow was through using the spray nozzle, which made it really hard to do any dishes. It wasn’t until a couple of days later that I realized we had a small leak coming from underneath the sink, getting water on our custom made cabinets (which were also brand-new!) Thankfully, I’d found out about HomeAdvisor through a potential collaboration they wanted to do and I knew how to solve our problem quickly and efficiently! I simply hopped online to the HomeAdvisor website, input the prompted information about our leaky sink and our location and within minutes, I had quotes from local plumbing services plus reviews from other customers.

After looking through our options and reading several of the review on HomeAdvisor with Cole, we decided to go with Berkey’s. They sent someone over that day, who told us that we’d need a new kitchen faucet and that the problem was caused by a new water meter the city had installed which caused build up in our faucet and damaged it. He even let us know it would be much more affordable to buy a sink on Amazon, where’s we’d purchase our original faucet, AND did a full check on the cabinet beneath to make sure there wasn’t any mold from the leakage. He gave me a number to text as soon as the new faucet arrived so he could come in that day and have it installed. Within just a couple of days (enough time for our new faucet to arrive!), he was back and our new faucet was installed and working better than ever before!

HomeAdvisor made the process of both diagnosing our problem and finding the right company to do our home repairs SO easy and efficient. As a new home owner, home repairs can be really overwhelming and scary, but with a service like HomeAdvisor that does the searching and the price quoting for you, the problem feels a lot less daunting. We’ll forever be using HomeAdvisor in our future home repairs!!

Our Small White, Gold and Grey Kitchen Design Reveal

So back to our kitchen reveal. As I talked about in our living room reveal post, our new home is definitely on the smaller side, and when I saw the kitchen for the first time, I might have cried a little (see photos below to understand why). The dark wood and green cabinets and countertops were a bit of an eye sore, the white square tiles were probably from the original 1980-something construction and it was all topped off by low popcorn ceilings (yuck!) We originally thought of ways that we could somehow open the kitchen up to the living room, but because of where it was located, it would have involved expanding our living room into the garage and a whole lot more time, work and money that we didn’t want to sink into the house. Luckily, with some new cabinets and countertops paired with some fresh paint and appliances (and removal of the popcorn ceilings), the kitchen ended up looking and feeling like a breathe of fresh air. With our cabinet and appliance choices, we were able to save some space, and our small-but-mighty kitchen ended up being just the perfect size for our small family of three.

The Renovation Details

As you can see from the photos, we kept everything really light and bright in the kitchen, starting with our white cabinets. My biggest piece of advice for styling and/or renovating a small space is to keep everything as bright as possible. Darker colors tend to box rooms in, and especially in a  kitchen, you want the space to feel as light and airy as possible. I actually wanted a granite that was a lot lighter than what we got, but the granite ended up being way darker than the sample was (because the sample was unpolished) and I’m actually grateful that they’re not so light/white because they do tend to hid messes easy (and now that Evie’s eating solids, we have lots of those!) We also knew we wanted to keep it really neutral both style-wise and color-wise because we know we’re going to outgrow this home in a few years as our family grows and we’ll either be renting it out or selling it, so we wanted it to be a look that everyone would love.

One styling choice I did make that Cole wasn’t so certain about was the gold hardware and the gold kitchen sink. With all the grey and white tones I wanted something to warm it up a bit and I think these did the trick perfectly! We actually got the hardware from Amazon at amazing prices!! The little handles and drawer pulls come in every size you can think of too!

For the flooring, we continued the porcelain we used in our living room and I also love how the wood look kept the space from looking too stale. The paint is also the same we used for the living room – the PERFECT neutral grey tone called “Repose Gray” by Sherwin Williams.

 Our Space-Saving Choices

There were a few choices we made that really helped us save space and maximize our small kitchen area. One of them was the pull out trashcan we incorporated into our custom cabinets, which helps hid the mess of a trash can and also allows more space in the room. The other was the pantry, which we also built in to our custom cabinets since the kitchen didn’t have a pantry. Our cabinet/pantry consists of two large doors that open to three huge pull out drawers. I was a little worried at first that it wouldn’t be enough space but it’s actually plenty! We also saved space when choosing our appliances. We got a microwave that has a built-in toaster oven feature so we didn’t have to waste any counter space on a toaster or toaster oven, and we got an oven that’s standard-sized but comes with two separate functioning ovens so we can bake more than 1 thing at a time. The last thing that helped us save space is our decision to place the wooden book shelf seen above in our kitchen (it was in our bedroom in our last home). This way, it could double-function both as a way to store some of my favorite MacKenzie-Childs and Anthropologie pieces and also as decoration to add some fun color and patterns to our small kitchen space.

The Decor

As you can see, we were very limited when it came to decorating our kitchen area to make it feel like a home. We knew we wanted a small kitchen table to go in the space by the windows (which has especially come in handy now that Evie eats three meals a day) and this round wooden table from At Home Stores was the perfect size. When we found that the wooden book shelf fit perfectly in the extra space we had between our garage door and counter, we knew we’d maxed out on furniture in the space.

I had to add some color to the super neutral grey, white and gold palette of the room, and since we also didn’t have any wall space, I decided to sprinkle in some colors through a few accent kitchen pieces in teals and turquoise tones throughout the room and some fun patterns with my black and white MacKenzie-Childs pieces. When I found this teal runner rug and teal accent dining chairs from At Home Stores, I knew they’d be the perfect way to continue the color story.

The Before Photos

And here you can see what our small kitchen looked like before we did the renovations and decorating (scary, right?!) I absolutely love how it looks now and though it may be small, it’s plenty big enough and cozy for our family.

Click here to see more spaces from our new home and stay tuned for more reveals here on the blog!

 

Fair-well xx,

**Thanks so much to Home Advisor for sponsoring this post. All opinions are my own.