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Kitchen Plan B
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After our initial sticker shock with the Home Depot design we decided to shelf (pun totally intended) this project for a later time and focus on other areas of the house. But it was always in the back of our minds.
That said, as hard as it was to wait, I would totally recommend at least a slight pause to anybody eager to take on a project as intense as a new kitchen. Why? Well, over the course of a year our tastes took a 180, our knowledge grew, the quirks of our current kitchen became more apparent, surrounding rooms took on new style and our overall “wants and needs” matured.
What that left us with was a well thought out mental list of all the things we wanted to incorporate.
In addition to brainstorming we did a bit of research and landed on two brands that would ultimately save us a little bit of green – Ikea and Kraftmaid. We went and looked at both and both were great but Ikea had so many options, were extremely modular, and had the best deals (20% off once a year).
After spending about 8 hours playing around in Ikea’s 3D kitchen tool (which is awesome I might add) we fell in love.
You’ll notice we decided to go with white cabinets like we mentioned in this post. We figured that white cabinets would help to air out the space and ultimately tie the kitchen in with some of the other white decor in our other rooms.
We toyed around with the idea of getting rid of the peninsula but but really liked having that counter space anchoring the kitchen down.
It’s served us well as a buffet when we have large groups of friends and family over so we just couldn’t get ourselves to give it up.
We also decided to add a row of half cabinets along the formerly unused wall to the left of the refrigerator to take advantage of every nook and cranny while still not weighing things down.
In the end, we had the software calculate what was “in our cart” and the total came out to about $4,800. Not too bad. And if we planned to take advantage of that 20% off sale it would be even better. But we’ll get to that later.
What have you guys been up to? Any big projects? Any suggestions for our future kitchen? Lessons learned?
We have made a few changes since these were done but we’re keeping that on the downlow for now. – Stay tuned!
Any place that would have a cellphone dropped to charge, or a laptop open with some discussion of anything, I’d recommend putting a standard NEMA-5-15 power outlet.
The reason is this: I have outlets on either end of my kitchen island, and you’d be amazed how often iDevices (mine or a visitor’s) are plugged in charging — but kept in the viewable area because we keep turning to them to ‘find that music” or “is it really 4.5 hours to Whistler?” or such.
I dropped in a pair of FastMac outlets: standard NEMA-5-15 replacements, but they add a pair of non-vampric 2A USB ports for power.
Dude, that is a great idea! A buddy of mine just suggested the same thing but I wasn’t sure where to put it in the new layout. What do you think of that half cab along the wall to the left of the fridge? Seems like a decent place to throw miscellaneous items (ie cell phones, ipads, and so forth).
I wonder if there are any zwave controllable USB outlets… that could be cool to use with SmartThings.
Appreciate the input!
JD