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!