From Backsplash to Full-Blown Reno: How Our Main Floor Transformation Began (pt. 1/3)
Part 1: How Our Kitchen Reno Accidentally Started (and Immediately Escalated)
We’ve lived in our 80s-built (but somehow feels like a much older farmhouse) home since 2006 — which is wild, because I’m still pretty sure I’m only 27. Over the years, we’ve slowly made this place our own, but the kitchen has always been… a story. And not necessarily a short one.
And before I go any further, I should probably clarify one important thing: We didn’t hire this entire renovation out. Sam is a pipefitter by trade and, in general, just happens to be one of those people who can look at something and go, “Yeah, I can fix that.”
Which meant that the vast majority of this project — from plumbing and framing to trim, electrical, and problem-solving on the fly — was done almost entirely DIY. It also meant this renovation was very much a family project, in the truest sense — equal parts teamwork, dust, and “are we really doing this right now?” energy.
The First Kitchen Era: What Even Was That Layout?!
I don’t have a lot of photos from back then, but when we first moved in, the kitchen was truly something.
Picture this:
The dishwasher was at counter height (that’s it on the left of the photo up in the air)
So was the oven (behind me)
There was a giant open cavity under the oven that we used for trash storage
And the sink was shoved into a corner between the two like an afterthought
There was no island, very little functional counter space, and zero sense that anyone who cooked had ever been consulted.
It worked… technically. But barely.
The Fire That Forced Our Hand
Then in 2012, (after a very questionable teal paint job) I accidentally set the kitchen on fire with an ill-placed bag of groceries on the stovetop while chasing down a toddler outside. Came back, the whole place was filled with smoke and the damage was done.
So… we renovated. Kind of.
We:
Moved the sink under the (TINY) window
Switched to a range
Installed a normal-height dishwasher
Tried open shelving (which was fun for a while!)
And it really was a big improvement, but it still wasn’t right. There were still layout issues, awkward flow, and one particularly rage-inducing feature… Right between the kitchen and dining room sat a column that housed plumbing for our upstairs bathroom.
Structurally necessary.
Aesthetically offensive.
Emotionally… triggering. 😅
It chopped the room in half visually and mentally and it made me crazy every single day. The day that Sam rerouted that bad boy was one of my favorite days of the whole project!
The Trim, The Floors, and the Slow Accumulation of “We’ll Fix That Someday”
The entire main floor also had this thick, rough cedar trim everywhere — installed with… enthusiasm… but not a lot of craftsmanship.
And because removing it meant confronting whatever chaos lived underneath, we’d left it alone for years.
We also had LVP flooring that had been installed in phases over time, which resulted in several slightly different, almost-matching shades throughout the main floor that drove us crazy.
And of course, like any true 80s home…outdated ceiling fans and popcorn ceilings. Late enough to not be asbestos (thank GAWD), but still outdated and bleh. They’d always been on the mental list of someday projects.
Wait, how did we get here, again??
In true Chance Family fashion, this renovation did not begin with a carefully planned design meeting.
It started with the innocent idea of:
“Hey… maybe we’ll finally just add a backsplash.”
Which somehow turned into:
“What if we scrape the popcorn ceilings real quick?”
And lemme me tell you:
Scraping popcorn ceilings is NOT a whim project. Not even a little bit.
Sully and I decided to try it one day and within hours we were covered in plaster, regretting every life choice, and fully committed whether we liked it or not. There is no halfway point with popcorn ceilings. And these bad boys had been painted, which meant they were even harder to scrape. Sully did the majority of the grunt work on these (ever so thankful for teenage boy strength and stamina). We tried every method we could find on YouTube - wetting down with water first, spraying with vinegar, scraping with special scrapers, scraping with scrapers on poles… honestly, it just came down to brute strength and hard work, and SO MUCH MESS.
And Then… It REALLY Escalated…
Before we knew it:
Ceilings were scraped
Trim was ripped out
Floors (multiple layers, as it happened) were yanked up
Cabinets were demo’d
Plumbing was being moved
Drywall was getting replaced
And we discovered some truly questionable electrical choices hiding in the walls (like live wires with no covers, just hanging out)
And then…We decided to cut a hole in the side of our house.
Not a little hole.
A hole three times wider than the original window, framed out for what would become our beautiful new oversized kitchen window.
Which meant that for approximately three weeks, our house had a plywood-and-tarp situation where a wall used to be while we casually went about our lives.
And yes — it stormed. Twice. But only twice, which honestly felt like divine intervention. There is something deeply humbling about watching rain hit a tarp where your wall should be and thinking, “Ah yes. This is fine. Totally normal home renovation behavior.” 😂
It was chaos, but through it all, we were doing it as a family — with Sam carrying the brunt of the skilled labor and the rest of us contributing in… me, mostly in moral support and following him up cleaning in his wake, whether he wanted me to or not. Although, we also found out that Sully is a flooring badass - from ripping it out to installing - which was pretty cool.
Oh — And It Wasn’t Just the Kitchen
Because of course it wasn’t.
This quickly became:
Kitchen
Dining room
Living room
Hallway
Main floor bathroom
All at once. Because we don’t believe in small, contained projects.
Thank God for the studio — which became our living room, kitchen, and general life headquarters for the next four months, which felt like an eternity in the moment, but I realize now was shockingly fast for the amount of work we did on a DIY setup.
And Somehow… We Survived
What started as a backsplash idea turned into a full-blown main floor transformation. It was chaotic. It was inconvenient. It was messy and loud and created more dust than I’ve ever seen in my life.
But it also set the stage for the home we live in now — and the kitchen I can’t wait to show you next.
👉 In Part 2, I’ll walk you through the actual kitchen transformation: what we changed, what we love, and what I’d absolutely do differently next time.
