Cabinets…that is our biggest purchase. About forty-two linear feet of bottom cabinets and twenty-three linear feet of upper cabinets. I had my heart set on a off white cabinet with maybe a glaze to soften and warm up the cabinets. Stainless steel appliances and we would have a transitional modern country kitchen. At least that was the plan.
You can buy anything you want and someone will sell it to you. When several cabinet makers, sales people, and our painter explained that even the expensive custom made cabinets can show cracks in the mitered joints of painted cabinets after several years I had to rethink what I really wanted and our investment in the remodel. My father was a master carpenter and employers always put him on finish jobs when they discovered his attention to detail and craftsmanship. I knew if my dad were here to advise us, he would tell me to find a new option.
The hard part is giving up the dream in your head, the one you can picture even when you are staring at old outdated cabinets with dingy carpet and nineteen seventy-six appliances. It wasn’t just one change, it was changing everything because dark floors and wood cabinets stained a darker shade would look like a cave.
We still have two bids we are waiting on for cabinets but working with Troy yesterday on his bid and our options meant a mostly sleepless night of thinking, internet research, and staring at the kitchen trying to envision a color scheme. Troy gave us some good ideas but said we should look for flooring before cabinet colors.
We started our homework as soon as we left and continued our search yesterday with some help from our friend Bob who gave us a great tip. First stop we found flooring that we both liked, the salesperson has it in his home and tells us it will hold up to the dog. We made another stop just to look and the funny thing is the next store had the same flooring but under a different name and a higher price.
We took the sample to the cabinet shop to look at cabinet doors and colors. Troy is working up his final bid and the savings in cabinets with an additional 10% from the cabinet company and a savings on the floor, he is pricing out granite for the counter tops which we did not think was in our budget. It still might not be, but where we would have passed on a bid including granite prior to our changes, we can now consider looking at the cost. The one we like is white with flecks of all the colors of cabinets and appliances we are considering. We’ll have to wait and see.
The cabinets are now going to be a warm saddle/coffee color and the flooring is laminate called Bourbon Street Applewood. The kitchen island will be the off white with a glaze and the moldings will blend the cabinet color and a dark almost black molding around the crown and the bottom of the upper cabinets. Details…it’s all about the details.
We need to check on the kitchen cook top vent hood to see where it is in transit since it has been a week since we ordered it. I will picked up the new garbage disposal today and we will order the sink, faucet, and trash can within the next couple of days.
Larry needs to choose a new fan for the study to install while the electrician is here working and we chose a new ceiling mounted light to replace the low hanging fan in the sitting area off the kitchen. I found and pinned on Pinterest about a dozen light fixtures that I liked to hang over the kitchen island and then had Larry look at them and see if any of them appealed to him or start searching again. He choose a five light hanging fixture that resembles vintage wire bulb cages that you might have found in industrial buildings or garages. We were looking for something we liked but just a little different than what you typically find in a kitchen. The choices ranged from wire, welded and hand-stamped steel, crystals, stainless and drum chandeliers. This is what Larry would say is a “lagniappe”, a little something extra in the kitchen, the unexpected.
Hopefully in a couple of weeks we will be in the demo phase.
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