Without a doubt, the room I’ve spent the most time daydreaming about is the kitchen. There are just so many choices and options, it can keep me entertained for hours 🙂 Since I have such elaborate schemes hatching in my head, I figured… why not share them with you? They are just dreams for now, more pressing items include installing flooring so we aren’t living on plywood sub floors. But why not dream a little… ? 😉
First, a look at layout. Below is the house layout for the first floor as is now.
First Floor
As I mentioned in my post of house pictures (where I totally forgot to show any second floor pics…), ideally I would love for the wall between the kitchen and the dining room to be gone. Now, Jake has given it his preliminary assessment…. and he believes the wall won’t be load bearing (based on the direction of the trusses in the attic), but there will be a gas line to move :/ Which could cost a bit, so we will see.
You can see above how the kitchen is laid out now, and the wall that I would like to remove.
The layout I’ve been dreaming up in my head looks like this:
After removing the wall, I extended the area of the kitchen two feet into the dining room (I think there will still be plenty of space in there). The sink will be in the same place mostly because it needs to be under the window and you can’t move that 😉 (yay for not rerouting water lines!) But the oven will relocate to the ‘nook wall’ while the Fridge ends up on the other side of the sink.
Below is a mood board that gives a good feel of the look I’d like for our kitchen…
Kitchen Mood Board
I’m a big fan of the domsjo IKEA farmhouse sink (pictured above). It is pretty reasonable, as far as those types go, and it is huge and not too deep! I’m already in love 😉 It would be neat to have an industrial sprayer faucet too. You can also see some subway tile on the board. Predictable? Maybe, but it’s just so classically beautiful that i can’t resist!
Let’s talk cabinets. Now, in my opinion, cabinets make a kitchen… and to achieve the perfect look I’m dreaming of (and not spend a fortune) we would have to make them ourselves…. But, that may be a bigger project than we can take on, it remains to be seen. I would LOVE to have chunky, modular inset shaker cabinets, like the ones pictured above. Now, IKEA sells some shaker-like cabinets that are nice, but they are overlay… And for some ridiculous reason, I really love inset better. I think because inset cabinets really speak to quality craftsmanship and give an authentic ‘older’ look, as they have to be very carefully measured and made to fit snuggly inside the the face and they really aren’t made that way very often anymore because of the custom precision necessary.
(Cabinet 101: inset doors sit inside the face frame and you can see the frame in between the cabinets. partial overlay cabinet doors sit on top of the face frame but do not touch each other. full overlay are on top of the face frames and cover them completely)
Another fun (and maybe crazy) idea I am throwing around is white uppers with blue (or teal or navy) lowers. Daring… right? I think it could look so fun and classy. But there is danger that it is a little ‘trendy’ and could look cliche.
And this brings us to countertops…. (dun dun dun duuuunnn) If we were to do non-white lowers, I think the counters would have to be white to balance the color and darkness in the room. And friends, in an ideal world, I would have marble countertops all day, everyday. But, I recognize that they are not the most scratch/etch resistant surface out there and therefore not the most practical. (Marble has been the source of some friendly verbal sparring between Jake and I. 😉 )
Of course there is granite, of which I would prefer the least ‘grainy’ look attainable in a light light grey. Laminate, without a doubt is the most practical choice for a kitchen… but just not the most beautiful. I briefly considered solid surface countertops because I think they can look nice in a modern white, until I read they they are extremely stainable… If we are getting high-maintenance countertops, they might as well be marble 😉 Concrete is beautiful, and DIYable, but also high-maintenance (and a lot of work to make lol). So we will see…
See that island? I love the idea of a skinny island in a galley kitchen. In my kitchen diagram above I added a narrow island that I think would serve to add lots of prep space as well as a little extra storage. Maybe if I’m too chicken to go with blue lowers, I can do all white cabinets and a blue island 🙂
I’m thinking instead of upper cabinets around the stove, some kind of open shelving, maybe like the picture above. Also I just had to squeeze my ‘appliance garage’ in there. Did you notice it in my layout plan? I love the idea that you have a cabinet that sits on top of your counter and houses those appliances that are usually in the way like the microwave and toaster oven. And you can close the door and they are out of sight!
It’s fun to dream about the pretty stuff since lately the house realities have looked more like this….
But it’s all part of the process, and dreams like this that keep it going 🙂
