Kitchen Remodel Plans!

The Anchorage apartment kitchen remodel just got me even more excited about refreshing our current kitchen.  I've spent many a restless night remodeling this kitchen in my head. Ideally we'd open up the wall between our kitchen and living room to give things a bit more of an open concept feel, but we don't really feel like spending a ton of money on doing a big fancy remodel on this house's kitchen.  She's a small, modest house and dumping a ton of money into a kitchen remodel isn't' going to increase our resale value enough to offset the cost of actually doing it, so we're going to keep thing simple, i.e. not knock any walls down.

This kitchen was new-ish when we bought the house. Our best guess is that someone bought the house to flip, or was trying to renovate it and ran out of money.  The inside had new paint, refinished hardwoods, and the kitchen was new, but the exterior was horrendous (like, my insurance company refused to insure the house because of it horrendous).  So it's a quasi-cheap flip kitchen.  The surfaces are all nice enough, but with a few tweaks here and there, this kitchen could be a fresh and modern space.

The plan:

• Take down the upper cabinets on the sink wall and replace with open shelving. Honestly, most of our upper cabinet space is just wasted space.  I'm too short to even reach 70% of the shelves, and we've got a built-in around the corner that can house the stuff that lives in them now. 
• Paint her white.  I do love me some chartreuse, and having a bright colorful kitchen was nice, but I feel ready for a clean slate.  I'm sure some pops of bright color will find their way into my styling, but for this new look (and for resale, I hear chartreuse kitchens aren't most buyer's fave), white is gonna do the trick.
• Tile that backsplash.  Goodbye nasty, weird, brown Formica backsplash.  I want to do square tile instead of the usual subway tile to give a little bit of a new take on a pretty played out (though still gorgeous) look. I'm sure white subway tile stock won't be dropping for some time, but I'm excited to try something a little different. For a bit of texture, I'm going to do dark grout instead of white.
• Walnut butcher block counters. The counters are the same brown-ish Formica as the backsplash, and I'm so SO excited to get rid of them and replace them with beautiful wood counters.  I love a butcher block countertop.
• Paint the old cabinets and give them some modern hardware. The remaining uppers on the stove wall will be painted white, and the bottom cabinets will be a dark charcoal.  None of the cabinets currently have any knobs or pulls (which is actually super annoying, but also great for keeping your baby from opening them), so I'd like to install some in a brass finish to add contrast.
• We also might get a new sink, but that's not a must-have, but if we do, it'll probably be a white ceramic sink, second hand from a local building material re-store.

Hopefully everything will go smoothly, but this process will likely take a while, since I'll be trying to get this done with a toddler (do you start calling them toddlers when they start... toddling?  Cuz Jack is only 10 months but he's toddling like crazy, soooo baby? toddler? I digress). I think the first thing I'll start with will be painting the bottom cabinets because I don't have to do any demo to get that done. Wish me luck!  I'll keep you guys updated.