The plan was to have the fourth post be about a delicious, healthy meal that I slaved over for my family to enjoy. There would be accolades about my cooking prowess. Children begging for seconds. Swooning all around the table. That’s not going to happen. And not just because I am a less than mediocre cook. My kitchen still looks like this:
That’s almost finished floors, almost finished cabinets and umm, that’s it. No appliances (they are sitting anxiously in the play room. Pleading with their no-eyes to be settled in their eventual home). No countertops, but those are due in 5 Days! So no cooking happening of course. Unless you count frozen waffles in the toaster oven.
Instead, I thought I would run down the process of pulling this kitchen together. I started with one of my top 5 websites of all times, houzz.com. I looked at dozens, hundreds, thousands of different kitchen layouts until I had an idea of what I would love and what would work for the space we have. Here is the inspiration picture:
[houzz=https://www.houzz.com/photos/105692/Two-Time-Award-Winning-Kitchen-traditional-kitchen-chicago]
We won’t have an exact replica when it’s done for several reasons. The inspiration kitchen was probably ridiculously expensive. I also don’t love everything about the inspiration including the hard wood floors (I like tile in the kitchen) and the over the top moulding. But the lay out will be very similar to mine and I love the blingy pendant lights and the dark wood island with white cabinets.
Using the inspiration as a jumping off point, I headed to Home Depot to actually get the design done. This is a free service that Home Depot offers and I was lucky enough to get a young man who had a design degree from a college in ITALY to do my design. He was very knowledgeable and clearly had a passion for his work. Once we had the layout, picking the actual styles of cabinets, countertops, etc was pretty easy because I had done my research. The hardest decisions were price based. Splurge on the to die for recycled glass countertops or the Thomasville cabinets? The Thomasville cabinets won that one, and my second choice countertops made of granite (YES, the granite was LESS expensive than the recycled glass!) is very nearly as gorgeous as my first choice.
Here is the low down on what we have picked out so far:
The dark brown cabinet is the actual shaker style door that will be in the entire kitchen, but that color will be only on the island. The light cabinet is the color of the rest of the cabinets. The cabinets are Thomasville from Home Depot. The tile is from Lowes and it looks absolutely gorgeous on the floors. That show stoppa pendant is from overstock.com. The appliances are GE from Home Depot (so excited for a double oven!). That granite is called Giallo Ornamental and it’s quite lovely. And the paint color is Benjamin Moore, Saddle Tan. I have this color in the dining room and it’s a warm neutrally brown.
Up next on the kitchen will be picking out the hardware for the cabinets and pulling it all together with some fun accessories like this teaser for tomorrow’s post. You’ll see these prints as part of My Favorite Things this Week post: