Finally our five-month kitchen project is over, and we have a fully functional kitchen. On January 23 we removed the upper cabinets, the hood, and the backsplash. The cabinets were mostly unused, and we wanted more light and open space to our kitchen.

We visited a couple of kitchen stores for quotes. It turned out that basically they provide full, not partial kitchens, which was what we wanted: a new work top, the hood, lights, and electricity only. We could get most of those thing from these stores, but had to find another person to do all other work but work top installation. We chose the store that promised the earliest date for installation, which was more than 1.5 month away from the date we accepted the offer. Immediately after we had paid them, they postponed the installation for two more weeks. D’oh!

A couple of days after the work top was delivered the guy came to install it, just to notice that the store had ordered a top with incorrect width and refused to install it (good for him!). Our bottom cabinets are of non-standard width, but still they had ordered a standard top (width 607mm). From the blueprints we could see that the salesperson had measured the width correctly at 610mm, but still ordered a top a few millimeters shy. A new installation was scheduled one month from that date!

Another month went by, and the new top, now of correct width, was delivered, and it got installed a couple of days after. It was only then that the other guy whom we had hired to do rest of the work could start. It took him five days to do tiling, electricity, lights, and install the hood. And he did an excellent job. He was super easy to communicate with, he kept us well informed about all intricasies of the project, and worked on a timely manner.
Before:

After:

Thereafter:This is the kitchen (except the new work top) in which we cooked most of the Spring; no hood, no backsplash, no lights.

For us the hardest part really was to choose the tiles; we visited several stores, and the only tiles we ended up liking were really expensive. However, it turned out that we do not only have an expensive taste but a difficult one. The guy who did the tiles “complained” that it was very laborous (it took him two whole days to finnish the backsplash) because the tiles we chose were hand made, and came all with different sizes, shapes, and thicknesses. But they look really good!

Voilà!