Lake House Kitchen Renovation: The Beginning + Mood Board & Inspiration
We’re almost done with our kitchen renovation at the lake house, so what better time than now to start writing about it, haha! I’ll estimate that all of the finishings will not be in place until the end of the year which means the renovation will potentially continue into 2022. But let’s actually travel back to 2019 when we kinda sorta started tearing this thing apart and did a whole lot of dreaming:
One maaaaajor issue you can’t see in this photograph is the low-hanging loft that Matt constantly hit his head on. When we took possession of the house we focused our attention on the upstairs bedrooms BUT the other thing we did was tear out the loft. The beams that had supported the loft stayed until 2020 when we really started digging into the kitchen renovation.
Neither of us had ever taken on a project this extensive but we knew a few things:
- the loft had to go and we would create an 8 ft. ceiling in its place
- the walls were in bad shape and needed reinforcement
- the cabinets with the sink and the stove would shift about 12″ to allow for a larger walkway into the guest room
- the fridge would move to the guest room wall
- the pass-through window desk would go away and we would create an eat-in dining area
Something we decided before we made an offer on the house was that we wanted to design this space to resemble Swedish summer cottages because Chautauqua Lake was settled by Swedish immigrants. There’s even a Viking Club. I wrote a little bit about the overall design inspiration for the house a while back, but overall, the backdrop is white walls, pale wood, and panelling along with modern touches, pops of color, and highlighting nature. I actually had a vision for the kitchen before I started looking for specific inspiration.
I started sourcing materials before I even made a mood board. I began gathering a few images I liked for the kitchen when I was searching for images of the tile I wanted to see how it looked in real life. I found the tile pictured above while looking for encaustic tiles on The Home Depot website and built the kitchen in my brain from there. Here are some of my favorite inspo images:
So there you have it! The before, the plan, and the inspiration! A little rustic, a little funky, a little traditional, a little modern. I’ll dive into project tutorials soon! If you want to skip ahead and see all that we’ve done, connect with me on Instagram @thelakeandtheland or on Facebook. 🙂