Every Detail Is Perfect Inside This Remodeled Navy Blue Small Cottage Home

Transforming a Small Cottage Home

You are sure to fall in love with this remodelled small cottage home. This remodel shows you how you can change up your home yourself and is sure to give you a few ideas along the way. The owners kept the layout the same, but took everything out and started with a blank slate. They added some white shaker style kitchen cabinets with pewter hardware, some open shelves, and swapped the old kitchen sink for an Ikea farm sink. They tiled the walls, replaced all of the appliances, added sconces, and then built a coffee bar and custom storage along the right wall to round out the kitchen space. Then they replaced the floor with some groutable vinyl planks that they found at Lowe's. The vinyl planks were easy to install, and they look wonderful in person. They laid the vinyl planks in a herringbone pattern, which gave the small cottage home floor a high-end look without having to break their budget. The kitchen countertops are Silver Cloud granite. They knew they were going to have a lot of white in the room, so they liked the fact that this slab would have lots of greys and blacks. They built a custom range hood that brings the white kitchen cabinets and the open wood shelves together, and they found a fancy slide-in range on clearance that topped off this side of the room.

Working Around Architectural Challenges

They took out the wall in the corner of the L to see if they could gain more counter space and found a grey cinder block chimney inside. Cinder block isn't as cute or charming like brick is, but they couldn't do anything about it, as it needed to stay where it was, and they needed to work around it. So, they left it exposed and then covered it with some brick veneer which is real pieces of brick that are about 1/4inch to 1/2 inch thick and installed like tile. It was a splurge at around $9 per square foot, but it was worth every penny. The brick helps to add so much character to space, and it's practically impossible to tell that it's veneer.

Maximizing Space with Creative Storage Solutions

Because the chimney in the small cottage home was only about 9inches deep, they were limited with their shelving/cabinet options on the sink wall. They chose to add open cedar shelves that go all the way across, which they attached with small brackets to the brick and the opposite wall. They added an elongated subway tile backsplash that they brought up to the ceiling. They also found the perfect sconces at a Restoration Hardware Outlet.

Innovative Refrigerator Placement and Custom Design

There was no fridge in the kitchen when they started the reno, so the remodel for this was a challenge to figure out where the fridge should go without taking up too much space or looking awkward in the corner by itself. They chose a counter depth fridge and then filled the entire side wall with a combination of custom built-ins, a base cabinet that matched the rest in the L and a custom coffee bar. They added cedar four-inch planks to the side of each built-in, which they originally intended to paint white but were surprised at just how much they loved it natural.