Hello beautiful people!
I have my coffee, water (because I always drink a glass with my morning coffee) and my favorite wooden wick, crackling candle burning.
We have been designing our 1977's kitchen from the moment we walked into the house and toured it for the first time. It's been remodeled slightly, including granite and probably a cabinet paint job, however....It's horrible to say the least. It's so tiny. To give you perspective, we only have 4 feet from counter to counter in our small U-Shaped kitchen. We can't open the dishwasher and sink cabinets at the same time because they hit.
It's horrendous.
My first apartment kitchen was significantly bigger than this one.
Okay, moving on.
So, like I said, we've been designing and dreaming of what our new kitchen could look like. It started out fairly simple and we thought just pulling the peninsula further out would be enough. We drew it up, and called it good.
Then, a friend of mine came over and inserted this idea that we could move our fridge to a separate wall and BAM. A new [ f a v o r i t e ] idea was hatched.
She designed it on her computer with a beautiful 3D rendering (because she's simply the best) and sent me photos.
I decided I wanted to test out Sketch Up from Google and design the kitchen with some finishes for ideas.
Here are a few screenshots of what I designed. It isn't the final product and changes were still made, but here's the initial design.
Keep in mind that not all of the cabinets match due to the program only having so many options :)
To give you an idea of how small our kitchen is now, here's some photos from the listing. These photos aren't even including appliances, so try to imagine a fridge and a stove fitting into this tiny dollhouse kitchen *insert laughing emoji*
We have painted the entire house too, so it's much brighter and farmhouse. :) To give you an idea, here is a before and after (during) of our dining room being painted. The same paint is carried throughout the entire house. We have yet to paint the bedrooms, but we aren't in a rush to fix those just yet.
One of our sweet pups kept me company during the painting process. :) As you can see our house has been going through some changes for a while and it's been exciting and tiring.
FINALLY. On to the kitchen design!
We've decided we're going with white/slightly grey Quartz countertops, white shaker cabinets, black hardware and accents, some natural wood open shelving, and some floor to ceiling pantry cabinets. We also have to raise our ceiling in the kitchen, because it was dropped to about 7ft (horrible!) when it was built. Our new kitchen will be about 14x11 so we have a TON of cabinets to purchase.
If you've ever remodeled a kitchen, you know that cabinets, depending on finishes, types, and styles, can get outrageously expensive...fast.
In order to save money, we've decided to order our cabinets from The RTA Store and assemble them ourselves. RTA means "ready to assemble" and these are a great choice to save money if you're comfortable with assembling them yourself. They come predrilled and with plenty of instructions. Just be prepared for this step to take longer to finish than pre-assembled cabinets.
We're all about saving money and since we've done some remodeling in the past on other houses, we're more than comfortable with doing this type of work on our own.
Okay, here it is! The current inspiration and finishes that we've selected!
1. Black bar stools for our peninsula
2. White Quartz countertops - Eternal Statuario by Silestone is pictured
3. Natural wood open shelving
4. White Shaker cabinets
5. Black pendant lighting above the peninsula and sink
6. White subway tile with dark grey grout
7. Our dark wood laminate flooring that was already in the house when we moved in
8. Long pulls for our upper cabinets
9. Domed pulls for the base cabinets.
Well. There it is. This was slightly drug out, but I wanted to give you a full idea of what we've been doing and what we have to work with.
I hope this inspires you to move forward with your home if you've been waiting or hesitant. My only tip is to be true to yourself. Styles change, we've tried MANY styles in past homes and trends, but this is finally the one style that has felt like HOME.
XO.