Holy moly…I can’t believe it was 2 years ago that Nate and I were finalizing the design for our major kitchen remodel! Time flies, y’all.
In summer 2023 we were receiving our Dwellify design box. We were choosing between the various cabinet, countertop, and backsplash samples that we had picked from our online Dwellify design quiz. (Seriously – funnest remodel process ever! We didn’t even have to load the kids in the car and spend the weekends schlepping them around town to home design stores!)
We made our final selections, Dwellify assigned a GC to our project, and demo started in August 2023.
2 years later of daily cooking, hosting family members, and 1 million toddler snacks, here’s how our kitchen is doing.
Why We Chose Dwellify for Our Kitchen Remodel
I know this sounds weird, but I actually heard about Dwellify from a random email PR blast.
Since I run several media sites, I get dozens of press releases every single day, and truthfully I just delete most of them. But I decided to click on this one and I’m so glad I did!
Dwellify is a turnkey design and construction company that does kitchen and bathroom renovations.
They’re unique in that everything is done virtually , which makes it so easy as a busy mom!
I took an online quiz to discover my style (I was in between “Mid Century” and “Transitional”), chose a few samples from within my style parameters, and my Dwellify Design Box showed up on my front door a few days later.
I love that I was able to see all of the tiles and cabinet samples in my own home. The lighting makes a big difference! (For instance, the cabinet color that I thought I was going to choose, the sample on the left, ended up looking way too red-ish in my home.)
Nate and I had unlimited 1-on-1 online meetings with a Dwellify kitchen design professional (Hi, Rachel!) who basically created our dream kitchen for us. She had me upload a 3D scan of our kitchen to their app, and she created a perfectly sized and designed new kitchen layout for us.
Dwellify assigned a GC and a personal project manager to our remodel, set a start date, and got to work.
As a busy working mom who has very little extra time for home projects at this stage of my life, I can’t imagine an easier home remodel experience that what I got from Dwellify.
morning in the life in my dwellify kitchen
Like most families, we use our kitchen nearly every minute of every day. It is quite literally the centerpiece of our home (and now it’s my very favorite room!), and from about 5:30 am – 10 pm the kitchen is being used.
5:30 am: I’m awake making my first cup of coffee or getting a water bottle full of electrolyte drink so I can head out on a run. I love being the first one awake! The kitchen is clean and quite. I unload the dishwasher (or both dishwashers if we’re hosting people and have a bigger-than-usual dirty dish intake), make my coffee on our fancy new automatic pour-over machine, and revel in the silence.
6 am: Nate’s busy in the kitchen packing lunches for the boys to take to preschool. I looooove that we can both go about our morning routines and there’s so much space in our kitchen now! That’s probably the most life-changing part of the remodel – the easy flow we have in this space since our Dwellify designer created a huge amount of space between the central island and the kitchen counters.
7 am: The two boys wake up and eat their breakfast. Some days they want to eat on the bar stools at the kitchen counter, and other days they eat in our cozy breakfast nook. Both of them love that microwave is at their height so they can use that to heat up certain breakfast items.
Already before 7:30 am kitchen has gotten hours of use from our family. And here’s the thing: it’s so easy to get into a routine and go on autopilot and forget o feel so thankful for this kitchen that I’ve been dreaming about for years.
So (and this might sound cheesy, but it’s true…) I always make sure to say a little prayer of gratitude in the morning. I take 10 seconds and just feel all the gratitude pouring through my body for this gorgeous space that I get to live in every day.
If you’re thinking about using Dwellify, you can use the code KELSEY99 to get a Dwellify Design Box for just $99 – that’s $200 off!
Design + layout decisions i still love (2 years later)
A kitchen remodel is highly personal. My husband and I made a few personal decisions in our kitchen that I’m still very happy about.
Double dishwashers! It is insanely luxurious to have two dishwashers. We use them all the time! Whenever Nate cooks for extended family (his parents, my sisters) or I’m hosting a group for girls night or a kids birthday party, we use both dishwashers at the same time. It’s a total “champagne problem” to have so many friends and gatherings that we want double dishwashers to deal with the mess. But a kitchen remodel is pretty splurge-y to begin with, so I’m really happy we got the double dishwashers.
Lots of space between the island and the wall. Our Dwellify Designer chose the exact measurements based on how much space the oven and dishwashers need to open at the same time. She nailed it! We have plenty of space and the new kitchen design is a lot bigger and more spacious than the old one.
The load bearing wall removal was 100% worth it. This was a big decision to make because it added extra time and cost to our project. But both Nate and I decided that if we didn’t remove that load bearing wall now, in 5 years we’d look back and regret it. Even though it added a few extra weeks to our project and we had to make some cost-saving tweaks in other areas, I’m really glad we removed that load-bearing wall.
WHAT'S HELD UP THE BEST
One of the scariest parts of investing in a major renovation is wondering if the quality of work will be worth it. After all, you’re handing over tens of thousands of dollars to a company and hoping that the contractor doing the job will do it well.
(I mean, I have literally no idea how to do any of this stuff, so I was blindly trusting this team to perform this massive construction project in my home.)
After two years of a LOT of wear and tear (hey, I have two crazy boys and they are really rough on things!), here’s how everything has held up:
Cabinets: literally perfect. They’ve been so sturdy, despite many cars and trucks and other moving objects flying through the air and hitting them. (If you have young boys, you know.)
BEFORE: when we bought the house, the kitchen had butter yellow cabinets with a brown subway tile backsplash.
AFTER: we chose these “buckskin” colored cabinets and a midcentury mint geo-tile backsplash for our new kitchen Reno.
I’d say I was most nervous about the cabinets on install day because I really wanted to love the color, and it’s hard to tell what the color will actually be. Despite getting cabinet samples mailed to us, the real color always looks a bit different when you see it at scale.
I’m happy to say that two years later, I’m still fully obsessed with my neutral wood cabinets.
When we first started thinking about our remodel, it was 2021/2022 and the all-white kitchen trend was big. I was thinking I might want to do white cabinets and white counters, which was all over Pinterest at the time. And I’m really glad my Dwelify design quiz showed me these gorgeous Buckskin cabinets, because 2 years later I’m in love with them.
I mean, trends change, and I know my personal preferences will change, but they’re a pretty timeless look and they really warm up the space.
(Side note: I know if I had ended up choosing an all-white kitchen, or light wood cabinets, I would have fallen in love with those, too! I’m just really happy with what we ended up picking.)
Countertops: Quartz is just as easy to care for as everyone says. They’re very easy to wipe down and clean when the boys spill paint or markers or nail polish or whatever on them.
There’s only one little “ding” in the kitchen counter that chipped. I was unloading the dishwasher and it hit the edge of the counter with one of my heavy Anyday dishes, and a tiny area (¼ inch maybe?) chipped off the counter. I didn’t even know that could happen, ha! But apparently it can. So I need to get someone in the kitchen to fix that.
Backsplash: Absolutely gorgeous and still in perfect condition. I LOVE the backsplash that Nate and I finally landed on! We went back and forth a million times, but this one is absolutely a winner.
Appliances: We hand selected all of our appliances instead of going with the brand that Dwellify provides. That was a “Nate thing” so if you want to know specifics about the exact appliances he chose, talk to him! He’s the chef in our family.
They were all installed correctly and everything is working great two years later.
*****We had one small issue with the vent over the stove. The contractor actually had to cut a new hole through the exterior wall to fit the new vent hood. One day, we had an exceptionally rainy and windy storm in Austin, and the rain started coming in from that new hole they had cut in the wall! Our kitchen was under warranty so I emailed our Dwellify project manager, and she had the GC come out and fix the issue so it wouldn’t happen again. He also had to replace a little bit of the drywall on the ceiling that had been damaged from the water. The entire thing was handled in about 48 hours.*****
What I’d Do Differently If I Could Go Back
So we removed one wall (the load bearing wall) and we added one wall (we closed up the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room.
The only thing I can think of is that I might not have closed off the wall to the dining room. In the picture below you can see the kitchen with that doorway into the dining room:
And here’s that same wall with the doorway closed off into a solid wall of cabinets and counter:
I really love the extra counter space and cabinet storage, but I also blocked off some of the natural light that was coming through that wall.
If I could do it again, I would have turned it into a pretty arch and kept it open.
Not a major thing, and on the flipside I get extra space on the countertop (which we use daily!).
So if you’re planning out your remodel and you’re thinking of removing/adding walls, I’d recommend hanging up a really dark blanket over the opening and living with it for a few days to see how it changes your natural light. In our case, we opened up a wall when we removed the load-bearing wall, so the light in our kitchen remained pretty neutral. It’s hard to tell if you’re removing walls, but if you’re thinking of adding a wall like we did, you can pretty easily mock it to see if it’s something you’ll like. I wish I had done this!
Would I Choose Dwellify Again For A Remodel?
Yes, and I already did. 🙂
Nate and I have a rental property in Austin that we operate as an Airbnb. We hired Dwellify to renovate both of the bathrooms last summer. They did an awesome job – you can look at them on our Airbnb listing here!
I really am such a huge fan of this brand, and I’ll keep recommending them for home renovations! They work quickly and efficiently, have an amazing lineup of contractors around the country, and I love all of the Dwellify folks that I’ve corresponded with. Just really nice people!
As someone who isn’t especially skilled at interior design and often gets analysis paralysis, I can’t see a world where I would have been able to choose all of the kitchen textiles on my own. I LOVE the Dwellify Design Box where they send you various samples of your choosing. All the samples are designed to work together (you pick a “style” on their website and then choose textiles from within that style). I get to play “designer” but it’s also pretty fool proof because they’ve set it up so that I literally can’t fail. Anything I pick is going to be gorgeous.
Planning A Remodel?
Drop a question below! I’m happy to answer any kitchen or bathroom remodels with my first-hand experience!
And if you’re thinking about using Dwellify, you can use the code KELSEY99 to get a Dwellify Design Box for just $99 – that’s $200 off!
