Small kitchen gets a new and bigger space

This post has been long over do! For those who follow me on Instagram, is no news that I’ve been remodeling my kitchen for a couple of months now. But this is no ordinary remodel. This is a total transformation because our small kitchen gets a new and bigger space!

When we first moved here in 2015, we gave the kitchen a quick refresh. While keeping the same square footage, we tried to maximized the best we could the space we had. One of the things that was a real challenge was the pantry. We solved this momentarily by adding 3 stacked 9″ wide cabinets to the side of the fridge. Looking back now, I really cannot explain how did we fit canned goods, flours, etc in this small space!

This was the view from the old kitchen towards the garage. As you can see from this photo, we only used this area for storage and laundry.

Back to the “Small kitchen gets a new and bigger space” story, we always knew that this kitchen was momentarily. Fast forward to 2019 and after many health woes, we decided that it was now or never. Life is hard and sometimes we postpone plans just because we feel scare of the outcome or we simply don’t know where to start. But if we never start, we’ll never know! So I said “it is time, let’s begin!”.

This wall will be gone in a couple of days (see how I used to decorate this area in the past here). Check my instagram “Our Kitchen” highlights to see the complete process of this project.

Where to put this new kitchen

Options for the new location or this kitchen were limited. Living in a small old Miami house (1938) means you have to make good used of the space. One of the initial spots we had in mind for this new kitchen was the den. What I loved about this ideas was having the view to the patio. While this would have been a dreamy sight, the space was limited and the arrangement of appliances would have been challenging.

The second option, and the one that we went with, was the garage. While we knew we would have to sacrifice the storage (this area was only used for that purpose) I knew that the only way we could create a bigger kitchen was if we expanded to the garage.

The challenges

While in theory transforming a garage into a kitchen seemed like an easy and doable task; there were many challenges we had to face. To start with, many Miami houses are build with a crawl space. Our house was raised 2′ above the ground, but the garage was not. That meant that we needed to either go down 2′ to access the area, or raised the garage floor to be at the same level as the rest of the house.

Another challenge that we faced was breaking an opening from the garage to give direct access to the living room. The problem was that this wall was concrete (very hard to break) and in order to remove it, we would have to add a metal beam for support.

While all these challenges were resolved, we had just begun our journey towards our new bigger kitchen space. I’ll be sharing more on these very soon, so stay tuned for more! In the meantime, how about a virtual walkthrough of how the space will look and feel at the end.