When we originally designed our house, the plan was to recess the refrigerator into the mudroom to give the kitchen more space. Just before framing started, I made a quick decision to add a pocket door. It completely eliminated the ability to recess the fridge. For almost three years, the fridge hung out into the main traffic area of our home.

You can kind of see in the picture that directly behind the fridge is a closet that is part of the mudroom. The plan was to rip out the closet, push the fridge back and rebuild everything around it. I told my husband it shouldn’t take more than the weekend. HA! He reminded me that every time I say something like that it ends up taking a week. He was right.

What is the saying? “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” Well, step one was removing the cabinets from the wall. Then we needed to remove the trim and uninstall the pocket door.

The rest of this project was an absolute mess. We had to shift everything to the left 4 inches to accommodate the stairwell on the right. The 24-inch cabinets on the bottom and above the fridge had to be cut down to 12 inches. The little concrete countertop had to be remade to fit the new cabinet size. We had to move electrical boxes. I had to redo the tile on the wall, the tile in the mudroom, the drywall, the trim, and the paint. And the amount of dust created was insane!

My husband was right. It took a week. But the end result was so worth it!