Kitchen Project

I’d been wanting to start a series of posts about the renovation of our new home since 2023, but life moves fast, work piles up, and somehow, the idea just stayed an idea. What I absolutely couldn’t skip, though, was sharing the transformation of our kitchen.

For our first makeover, we chose a white marble countertop for the kitchen — as you may have seen in some of my older food posts — matching marble tiles, and wooden cabinets that we had covered with a waterproof black wood-textured adhesive from Leroy Merlin. It was quite affordable, but surprisingly high-quality, with a textured finish that made it hard to tell it wasn’t real wood.

The original layout of the kitchen was shaped like the Greek letter “Γ,” which I’d describe as an “L” turned upside down. From that initial layout, we decided we needed more space since we’re talking about a relatively small kitchen but its configuration allowed us to expand it into a “Π” shape (that’s how we call it here) that gave us much more storage, with plenty of drawers and cabinets.

I should mention here that both times, the renovation was done entirely by my husband. And honestly, he’s done an amazing job considering he’s not a professional. Aside from a few drywall additions we made to separate the lower level of the house from the upper one, everything was DIY. He measured and cut the cabinets precisely so they’d fit perfectly in place, installed the countertop, and laid the tiles with great accuracy.

In my opinion, projects like this require patience, creativity, and time. Of course, it was a pretty exhausting and time-consuming process — one week off work wasn’t nearly enough for him to finish the project — but the result, and the money we saved, made it all worth it.

Aside from changing the layout, we also replaced the sink, installed new white lacquered cabinets, switched the tiles from white marble to black marble, and of course, changed the countertop. I won’t lie we searched all over Thessaloniki for a black marble one, but we couldn’t find one that matched exactly what I had in mind. After a lot of thought, we settled on one that looks like black stone, almost like granite.

The kitchen with the new cabinets before we changed the countertop and the tiles.

He put in new edging strips that matched our new kitchen, installed cool white LED lights under each cabinet, filled the gaps between the tiles with grout, and added special mechanisms so the drawers and cabinets close softly and automatically.

The opposite side of the kitchen before the upper cabinets and the range hood were added.

Stay tuned for more updates and photos of our new kitchen.