Hiding our Dishwasher

While I’m not ready to share a full kitchen reveal just yet, (I know, I’ve really been taking my time with this, but it’ll be worth it!) I did want to share this surprisingly simple hack that Eric came up with to hide our dishwasher.

I don’t love stainless steel appliances (especially since they don’t really fit in with the age of our home) so when we first began to tackle the kitchen, I knew we had to come up with a way to disguise our dishwasher. At first I tried to find an attractive dishwasher option, and while there are some they tend to be a bit too 1950s space age style and also quite expensive. Since our dishwasher works just fine (and came with the house) we decided to keep it to save money. But I wanted to find a way to have it sort of disappear, so Eric came up with this solution – to make it look like part of the surrounding cabinetry by covering it in bead board and swapping out the handle.

Here’s how we did it :

1. The first step was removing the existing handle – which involved carefully unscrewing the face of the dishwasher. The screws for this were along the sides, and we did this while still keeping all of the wiring intact. We removed the screws holding on the original handle, and made a note of where would be safe to install a new one, without accidentally drilling through something vital. Then we reattached the face of the dishwasher.
2. Next, we cut the bead board to size – we needed about 7 pieces to cover the front, and just used the same bead board that we used for the walls. We attached the pieces together using wood glue and let them dry.
3. We covered the face of the dishwasher in heavy duty construction adhesive as well as the back of the pieces of wood. We put the bead board onto the face of the dishwasher and used clamps to hold it in place while it dried.
4. Eric then used this trim to create a ‘frame’ for the edges using corner molding, and I painted it all with Backdrop paint (shade is Lawn Party) to match the rest of the kitchen.
5. Then after everything was dry, we once again unscrewed the face of the dishwasher (now with the wood securely attached) and used screws to attach this appliance handle. It’s a brushed bronze color that matches our faucet and the shape of it is almost identical to the handles on our stove (which I can’t wait to share).
6. We screwed everything back together, slid the dishwasher into place, and voila! It disappears right into the cabinetry.

We’ve had the dishwasher hack completed for a few weeks, and it works perfectly! We are still planning on putting a toe-kick and some pieces on the side to really blend it in, but are in no rush as it looks good as is. Because of the depth of the butcher block on the counter, the ‘screen’ at the top of the dishwasher isn’t super visible when shut. I like that you can’t see the lights and buttons too much (in the above photo you can see that the dishwasher is on, but the lights are faint), and if you need to, you can lean down and peer under to see. It just means that we set what cycle we want for our dishes before shutting it to start, and it didn’t take much getting used to.

Overall I’m SO happy with how it turned out, and I love that it makes the kitchen look just a bit more period-correct for the age of the house. What do you think?