Kitchen Update & Design board

Months ago I blogged about our future plans for our kitchen, but since then our entire design plan has changed so today I'm here to share all the new details and updates with y'all!   

To begin,  in case you have forgotten, below is a picture of how our kitchen looked when we walked through the house prior to purchasing it. We bought the house knowing that we would want to update it, and in the last year we've made some changes including painting the walls, replacing the white appliances with stainless steel, and turning the peninsula bar stool space into a breakfast bar area (more on that later).  These few changes have already made a big difference, but we are finally ready to take that next step and really update the space. 

Before I talk about our plans for the space, I'll first catch you all up on where we are at with the space. For those of you who didn't see the original blog post, our initial plans where to make it a dreamy white kitchen by painting the cabinets, re-shifting the cabinets into an "L" formation and adding a large island. We had big plans for this space, but after much thought and compromising, my husband and I agreed that it wasn't worth putting that much money into the kitchen since we don't plan on staying here long term, and, well I wasn't able to convince Paul to let us paint them white. I don't entirely blame him though, because our cabinets are only 11 years old and I was a little reluctant myself of painting them and risking ruining perfectly good cabinets.  So although they won't be the white cabinets I so desperately wanted, I'm still confident that our plans will update this space tremendously and make it flow better with the rest of the house! 

So as I mentioned above, we recently turned the peninsula barstool area into a bar height breakfast bar. I never liked the fact that if you were sitting at the counter someone (especially kids) could just reach out there hand and touch the burner. Although I never liked this, I was going to just leave it as is, but after our new oven was delivered in December and it was deeper than we anticipated, our dishwasher could no longer open up all the way which left us needing to cut the countertop  so we could push the oven back. When we pushed the oven back a few inches, my husband and father in-law also built the half wall so we could have a breakfast bar. Right now it's unfinished but soon enough it will have countertop on it and it will be functional!! 

So now that you are all caught up to speed on the current status of the kitchen here is the design board for the space!!

Fiddle Fig Leaf Source

Coming up a with a design for this space was rather difficult because I really don't like the cabinet color I have to work with. I don't mind the look of light cabinets but ours are honey maple cabinets that have a lot of orange undertones. Eventually I had to get over the fact that they are here to stay and that I need to learn to love them, so I decided to go with a mainly white and gray color palette which will help to make the space look more updated, as well as cool down the rather warm toned cabinets. You all know by now that I love the color blue, and I considered the sea glass subway tile look but blue is a complimentary color to orange so that wasn't an option.

On the design board the flooring and subway tiles look the same color but as you can see in the real samples above that that isn't the case. The flooring sample that's in this design board is a Pergo laminate, but since creating it I think we have decided to go with a very similar looking vinyl option. Vinyl feels so similar to wood but is a lot more durable than laminate flooring. We are breaking this kitchen update into different stages and the flooring  is near the end, so the flooring may always change after I see the countertops and backsplash in. 

Speaking of phases, I'm excited to say that we yesterday we just moved forward with the first stage which included ordering the hardware, countertops, sink and faucet (already own). 

Deciding on what countertops we wanted took us quite some time. I would of loved doing a granite or quartz but I saw no reason to since this wasn't my dream kitchen, and no other comparable homes in the area have all granite or quartz countertops so we would get no extra return on investment for this material upgrade. That said, my husband wanted to replace our existing green laminate countertops with another laminate, but I couldn't find any laminate options I liked. After searching for awhile though, I was able to find a solid surface that I liked that had a reasonable price point. The one we decided on is the Lunar Sand by LG Hausys (located bottom left in picture). In certain light it looks pretty white, but as you can see in the image above compared to true white countertops it definitely is more of a light gray. In the image it looks like it has no pattern at all, but in life it has a very subtle one. 

The sink was also ordered in stage one, and although it's not my beloved farmhouse sink, I'm very excited about having a single bowl sink that is going to be under mounted. We currently have a double bowl sink and the two bowls are too small when washing larger pots and pans so I'm thrilled to get a larger one.

I mentioned this on Monday's post, but the other thing that has been ordered is a new cabinet trash pullout system.! As you can see in the photo above, we currently have a stainless steel trash can at the end of the cabinet, which works great, but I prefer my trash to be hidden:) That said, the new trash cabinet system will be installed in the cabinet right behind where the current trash can is. 

So I think that's about it for right now but as we get further into this kitchen update I will make sure to keep you updated! I'd also love to hear what you think about our kitchen plans in the comment section below! I'm hopeful that it all turns out like I have it envisioned in my head, and that after we update the flooring and countertops the cabinets won't appear as orange!  Fingers crossed! 

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