The kitchen: before, and progress

I wish I had a "proper" before shot of our kitchen, because it didn't look like this when we moved in two years ago.

Where the brushed stainless range hood is, lived a breathtakingly hideous and huge black microwave oven (yes, suspended above the stove and incorporating a range hood... of sorts...)

We tossed it the first month we lived here, along with the sad old black dishwasher, which made upsetting noises. So in fact, the "before" picture above is much better than what we saw when we moved in.

We've been moaning about the wretched wallpaper in our kitchen ever since we bought the house. Textured cream with marbled beige and gold through it. Ew.

What we didn't realise was that there was worse underneath. Behold....

And we had no idea there was even worse under that! Gasp:

We (and our neighbours Tom and Deonne, bless them) spent forever removing three awful and poorly-applied layers of wallpaper, only to discover that the villains who whacked up the very first layer hadn't bothered to use liner paper underneath. So.... hours and hours more, just to render the walls paintable.

Here are a couple of the contractors working on the kitchen:

Here's one of the stages that made me think, Oh my...

Below, Tom and Nathan sanding back the wreckage on the walls. Sanding, sanding, sanding...

Little Man-show, who became obsessed with letting us know what needed to be vacuumed...

Below, another stage where I thought, Oh my... (although you can see the top of the lovely new Bosch oven, beneath the tiler's chaos!)

The beginning of the tiles going up:

Some more of the tile, early stages, and a glimpse of the granite benchtops under a fair bit of debris:

And that's where I'm leaving it for now! Because I don't have an after photo yet, even though there is an After.

In a day or two, I promise...!