My Dream Kitchen Plans

I have been wanting to redo this kitchen since the moment we put an offer in on our house, but I also knew that I wanted it to be a pretty big revamp, which is why I haven’t tackled it yet. Truthfully, I wish we would have done this project two years ago because I could not be happier to see the old kitchen gone!

As if the universe knew my desires for a new kitchen but has a bit of a mischievous sense of humor, our dishwasher broke a few days before Violet was born. And by broke I mean started filling the kitchen with smoke and the smell of burning plastic anytime we tried to run it. So for the past six months, we’ve been washing dishes by hand – I am not built for that life, haha!

Unfortunately, our dishwasher was wedged between the floors and the counters, so we had no way of pulling it out to repair it without demolishing the kitchen as well. So here we are!

One of my main pain points of the original kitchen was the city-skyline-esque uppers. If those had been straight, I likely would have added additional uppers to take them to the ceiling, then painted the cabinets and called them good! But since we were having to demo the lowers anyway, I figured we might as well rebuild it the way that we want. The other tricky thing about refinishing these particular cabinets was the distressing. They were previously done with a very rustic, distressed, chipped paint look. Getting them crisp and smooth again amidst all that distressing would have been quite a challenge.

So here we are! One completely demolished kitchen, three kids five and under, and a microwave and DoorDash membership to see us through our next few weeks (months?) of kitchen chaos.

This is my plan for the space! Honestly, I’m totally giddy about it. Even though we were sort of backed into this project with the dishwasher hullabaloo, I am over the moon that I get to design a kitchen from scratch and then actually use it instead of making this one of our last projects in this house.

At its bones, this will be an IKEA kitchen. I really love the organization solutions and modularity that IKEA offers. I was able to use the space pretty efficiently as well, so I don’t really have any large gaps of unused space.

That glass tower cabinet from counter to ceiling is something I knew I wanted and I can’t wait to see it installed. I am getting rid of the angled corner cabinet and replacing it with a blind corner cabinet because angled cabinets just aren’t for me.

We’re using this really pretty soft gray color for the cabinets (Brightly Beige) and having the doors made for us by Nieu Cabinet Doors. I knew that with the sheer scope of this project, I wanted the doors made and painted by someone else so that we could get our kitchen functional more quickly – maybe if my kids were in school I could make and paint the doors, but this was a no brained cost for me this time around. Out of the several door companies I looked at, Nieu Cabinet Doors had my favorite style (slim shaker) and they will custom paint your doors any color you want.

We also hired out demo this time around. If you’re a long time reader, you know that I very, very rarely have hired out work. But again – three kids five and under including a baby… having them rip everything out, haul it away, and clean everything up in less than two hours was well worth the investment.

I want to incorporate the dark, warm wood color potentially in some floating shelves to the right of the window? Paneling inside the tower cabinet? I just love it so much and think it’ll bring in a lot of depth.

Brass hardware is a no brainer, though I’m still trying to decide if it’s worth it to splurge big time and get what I really want or to save some money here.

But maybe I will splurge because we saved a ton of money on our countertop selection! Long story, but we ended up paying about a thousand dollars less than we were expecting. The ones we ended up picking are Ethereal Glow Quartz by Silestone.

We will be using a deep, black, single basin sink just like we did in our last house because we loved it so much! Bye-bye builder’s grade sink! And of course we’ll top it off with a brass faucet.

My next biggest decision I have to make is the backsplash! I either want something like this….

Or this…

Or this.

Which one is your favorite? I am having major decision fatigue with this kitchen, so I’m putting this one off for now. It could be something like one of those three, or something completely different! Haha.

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With love,

Mercedes 🖤