Kitchen Make-Over: Part 1

The Kitchen Bunch (set to the theme song tune of The Brady Bunch):

This is the story

Of a house on Lankford

With one really ugly 90's drop-in stove...

Well, ok, that's actually as far as I got in my Brady Bunch remix, but the kitchen is coming along nicely, especially since I hadn't set out to remodel it until two days ago.  Over the summer last year, three of the four burners on my 1990's drop-in-directly-wired-into-the-wall stove died.  I've been winging it with one burner and the microwave ever since.  That is, until a couple of weeks ago.  A very kind couple at church GAVE us their stove!  They are adding on to their kitchen, which includes a new stove, and they wanted to give us their current one.  Yes, please and thank you!  That stove is such a blessing for us, since a new drop-in would have cost around $1200.  I can think of alot of things I'd rather drop that kind of cash on.  The only trouble with getting this new stove was the fact that it is a free-standing stove.  It was time to bring out the power tools, people.  However, before we could do anything, we had to begin our journey with adding an outlet box to the existing wiring so we could plug-in and actually use the stove.  Just so happens that we got the stove during Mr. Chadwick's busiest week of the year, and electrical work was a no-go for his schedule.  Thank goodness we're likable enough to have some friends here.  Enter Mr. Handy Man Supreme and his amazing wife, Mrs. Handy Man Supreme.  They came over to do a ten minute job of hooking up the outlet and wound up staying three hours to run new wiring into the wall, attic, and fuse box.  Hopefully they still find us likable....

Phase 2 of Operation Get the Stove into Place called for cutting out the platform the drop-in had been on and removing part of the countertop around it.  Unfortunately, my new stove had to sit in the middle of the kitchen floor for a week before this could be done.  (Thank goodness my dad loves me enough to spend his entire Saturday doing carpentry work for free.)  Turns out, the new stove was 1/4 of an inch too wide to slide into the existing space, so a cabinet needed to be moved.  Here's how that went:

Unfortunately, I don't have a really good before picture of our original stove.  Here's the best I can do:

Tune in again tomorrow to see how the rest of the story unfolds...