Well, I think I’ve finally recovered from the One Room Challenge “burn-out” I experienced from such an intensive six-week journey, haha. Which is not to say that I wouldn’t do it all over again, the laundry room we have as a result was completely 100% worth it, and I certainly plan on participating again in the fall. But it did require a little break to recover. So while I haven’t been posting much, a lot has still been happening at our abode.
Back in May, Aaron’s parents came for a visit and we began the difficult process of cutting down our cabinet bases. They were custom-built two inches too high by the previous owners, and as a very averaged-height person at 5’4″, that was not working at all. As a little back-story, we’d had a couple of contractors take a look at cutting them down for us, but no one was willing to take on the task. They thought the process would be too difficult because the cabinets would need to be taken apart completely and removed, so they could be run through a huge table saw at a mill. This all seemed a bit extreme to us, and my father-in-law agreed to help us take it on, so with the combined efforts of a circular saw, jigsaw and multi-tool, I’m happy to report that the cabinets are down 1.5 inches from before. Which might not sound like a lot, but trust me, when your countertops come up to your mid-waist versus your hip, it is a pretty big difference in comfort.
I plan on doing a post on how we cut down the cabinets (and I’ll have an upcoming post on how we’ll paint our oak cabinets, since that will be a DIY job as well), but in the meantime here is the design board that we are working from. We are planning on a two-tone color with the cabinets, with the perimeter being BM’s White Dove, and the island likely in BM’s Grey Owl. We decided to go with quartz counters and loved the Hanstone line at our local stone yard. After bringing a couple of samples home, we choose Hanstone’s Montauk, which is a warmer grayish-white (but not so warm that it felt yellow). It is shown in the upper right corner of the design board below and has a really beautiful veining in it, that mimics marble nicely, but of course without the upkeep of marble. The measurements were taken yesterday, so we should have countertops in the next 3-4 weeks (yay!!).
In order to do the measurements, the sink needed to be installed, so Aaron and I got that put in on Monday, and it is already looking like a brand new space. Now that some of the new fixtures are going in, we can really start to picture this design coming to life and I can not wait for it to be even closer to what you see below. It is going to be a journey though, with painting the cabinets ourselves and doing the backsplash tiling as well, I’m guessing it will take a couple more months. If we are done by the end of September, that will feel really awesome, so wish us luck!
Dining Table // Wallpaper // Pendant Light // Chair
Media Console // Frame TV // Rug // Sconces
Oh, and a challenging part about this space is that it is completely open to both the dining room and a small-ish family room where we watch TV. So the design for the kitchen needs to tie in with those two adjacent spaces, which is why you see the non-kitchen items in the mood board above. Some of these things we already own and are working into the space, and some will need to be purchased new, so I wanted to ensure that any new purchases for these three rooms all coordinated well. However, wallpaper and rugs are some of the hardest things to color-match from an online image in my opinion, so it is possible that these will need to swap out with something else, based on the color tones they have in real life.
And because they’re so pretty to look at, here are a couple of the kitchens that inspired our space.
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