THE KITCHEN IS ORDERED!

It’s been a productive week this week, we ordered our kitchen!

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about my kitchen design inspiration so it’s about time I show you the actual layout…here it is!

When we were designing the house before we got the contractor involved there were a few things I knew I wanted: an over-sized window in the back with floating shelves and an island. I am so excited that we were able to work these into the final design!

The window in the back will be a great way to draw your eye to the back of the house right when you walk in the front door. Since the house isn’t huge we wanted to make sure we designed it in a way to make it feel much larger than it actually is, and the window and floating shelves will create provide that focal point for the eye as well as a sense of openness to the space.

The next step was deciding where to buy our kitchen. Now I know there are a million places to get kitchen cabinets – and we did check out a few of them in our area – but ultimately we decided on going with an IKEA SEKTION system. We did this for a few reasons: flexibility in the modular system they have, timeliness/immediacy of the ordering process since we didn’t know exactly when we would be ready to build the cabinets, and (of course) budget.

The other thing that helped make our decision to use IKEA cabinets was a company called semihandmade that makes compatible cabinet fronts in a variety of styles. I looked at tons of pictures and read a ton of blogs (like this one by Sarah Sherman Samuel) and decided that this was the way to go. These doors gave us the ability to get a custom kitchen at a really reasonable price.

IKEA offers an online kitchen planner tool where you can design your room by dragging and dropping their SEKTION cabinets. While the tool was a bit buggy, ultimately it gave me the freedom I wanted to design (and redesign) the kitchen without needing to travel to and from a store where I needed to work with someone else who was doing the physical clicking and dragging (there was just something so satisfying about doing it myself!). Finding the right layout of cabinets and sizes did take a lot of trial and error, many frustrations, revisions and realizations about things not previously considered but we finally landed on a design that will maximize the space we have available for the kitchen and I could not be more pleased with how the design turned out.

Below are some pictures of the final design! Everything has been ordered (with the exception of our appliances…more on that to come) so one more box checked on our way to a livable house! Now to wait for them to be delivered on October 6th…hopefully I don’t go crazy before then!