Our story so far: Tyler located a display model kitchen on Craig’s List that matched the style we were looking for inside the church we were turning into our home.

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The Craig’s List kitchen wasn’t perfect, but it was darn close. And the price? We were buying the whole kit and caboodle for about 25 percent of the retail cost of the cabinets alone. Coincidentally, the remodeling firm had just sold a different display kitchen to another woman who was renovating a church into a home. It was a trend.

But what would we have to jerry-rig?

A few things.

We’d need to find a 36-inch wide stove in order to fill the back wall of our kitchen space which was six inches wider than the display. But we already had an extra wide stove vent we could switch out with the display vent.

And the little drawers in the upper cabinets—supremely bad design. Even I, a 5-foot-10 woman, could not see inside the top drawers. Those would have to be replaced, but I had an idea we could reuse the little drawers in the master bath vanity. To fill the spaces next to the stove, we could use the glass-fronted doors on the hutch at the end of the island.

The tongue of the island was a bit too long for our space. We would need to have that shortened so it wouldn’t stick out from beneath our balcony. We decided to invest in having the countertop professionally disassembled, moved and reassembled. The countertop experts could shorten the tongue and smooth the other rough edges as part of the move.

And we’d have to flip the lower cabinets on either side of the sink so the wine rack would be on the side nearest the beverage bar.

We’d also have to invest in a new matching cabinet above the refrigerator and a few doors for the island so we could use it for storage. While we were adding, we could get coordinating cabinets for the beverage bar.

Even with the changes, we were scoring a budget-saving deal on a high quality kitchen.

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Tomorrow: Kitchen appliance Number One, check. Read about it here.