The Winner is..

Woo! We're going with white cabinets for the kitchen.

The samples came in and we spent a couple days mulling them over. The darker cabinet option was beautiful, but with the soffits/bulkheads over our kitchen cabinets, I felt as though the darker cabinets would only make our kitchen look smaller.. shorter, if you will.

The game plan is white shaker-style cabinets (even though I have a raised-panel option pictured above), but that option in itself is still up for debate. I worry that we might look back in 5 years and think, "These damn shaker cabinets.. trendy AF."

We've also gone ahead and decided to move on buying the flooring tile (pictured above). The thought right now is that we're going to do a herringbone pattern in the kitchen, mainly because I think we're going to run into uneven walls (or better yet, walls that are off by a 16th of an inch, as we've found is a trend in this house everywhere else.. who knew), and instead of having the vertical tile lines start to look crooked as they get closer to the cabinets, the herringbone pattern will be unique enough that people won't notice. Also, I want to do thin spacing between the tiles, and a dark gray grout to match the tile as best as possible. No more white grout. Not on a kitchen floor, that's for sure.

Once the flooring is all purchased (we're buying it 150 sq. ft. at a time for a total of 2 separate orders), we'll start saving up for the cabinets. They're "ready to assemble" - RTA - cabinets, and once we order them and they come in, we'll just store them in the garage. Then my thought process is to have an electrician come out and install recessed lighting in our kitchen ceiling so that I can get rid of the florescent light over the island (and put in 2 pendant lights!), repaint the ceiling, and then have a new window put in over the sink - a sliding window instead of our double-hung one that is a pain in the ass to open and close. When all of that is done, we'll move forward on taking out the old and replacing the new.

DH isn't 100% sold on recessed lighting. I think it's worth looking into, but of course if the estimates come back and we can't make it work, then we just can't do it. We'll keep moving along and maybe revisit in a couple of months.

But in the meantime, I'm excited to have a bright, light, airy kitchen soon!

Planning for a Kitchen Reno

I have hated our kitchen since we first walked through our house 7 years ago. Good space, sure, but it needed work. The ceramic tile flooring that previous owners put in was done poorly. The honey oak cabinets were showing their age. The laminate countertops were a faux green marble. Soffits/bulkheads adorned the tops of the cabinets, sadly. I saw potential, but I also saw dollar signs.. or, if I had an emoji handy, the one with the money flying away.

Luckily, though, kitchen renovations are expensive, and so are babies; so when we promptly had the Tiny Overlords, all my kitchen plans got side tracked.

However, these days, DH and I are seriously throwing around talk of getting new cabinets, countertops, and flooring. I am figuratively on cloud nine, y'all.

Here we have the 2 "vision boards" (?) I made with inspiration for the kitchen:

White Cabinets

Dark Cabinets

I've been so gung ho about a white kitchen for years now that I hate to even consider the darker cabinets, but the price is so much better with the darker cabinets that I'm entertaining it.. but let's be honest, I'm 99% sold on white cabinets. DH doesn't care, but he leans a little more towards the darker cabinets. Ultimately, if he has adequate island space for meal prep (he loves to cook), he's good.

Yesterday, I picked up sample tiles of the flooring in the white cabinet vision board. DH and I both really love it, and we're considering tiling the kitchen floor in a herringbone pattern. We'll see.

We're waiting for sample doors of the white and espresso cabinets to come in later this week so we can see the quality. We would be buying RTA (ready to assemble) kitchen cabinets and hiring a family friend who does kitchens and bathrooms to come in and install everything.

Either way, it looks like the kitchen reno is happening this year. Worst case scenario, I'm at least getting a new damn floor, and I'll giggle with glee as I smash the ceramic tile flooring that's in there now. You have no idea how much I loathe that floor. :)