The Plan For Our Kitchen

Hi, everyone! I had to take a little break this past week (and a half) because things were just super crazy! We got home from Colorado last week only to leave a couple of days later for Amarillo...and have somehow managed to keep up with all of our normal activities as well. We also have four showers, two birthday parties, and numerous Halloween activities to go to this month...so it's been really busy but really fun. Anyways...I'm back for the moment...and I'm going to write some about our kitchen today!

One of my favorite things about blogging is that I can usually sort out some of the craziness in my head when I write out a post. So, please excuse the explosion of my thoughts regarding our kitchen in this post. It really does help ;).

Our kitchen is probably the room in our house that I dream about more than any other, and it's easy to see why when you know that it looked like this when we moved in...

Ahhhhhhhh!!! It's like a horror movie. I know! I know. But really, the room has such  potential. Seriously, I am so excited about it, I can't stand it. It opens up to the dining room with the huge bay window that I have shown you before, so it has a lot of natural light. It also has a great layout, and, like everything else in the house, is very basic and bare so is pretty much a blank slate. The only things we've done since these pictures were taken is paint the walls and put in wood floors. I've attempted to accessorize, but it doesn't do too much good in this situation ;).

The cabinets are total crap (shallow, no shelving, literally falling off the hinges), so we want to replace them. The original plan was to gut everything sometime next summer...like really...everything, and put in some kitchen cabinets from Ikea. I've read great things about them, and have seen them in real life and love the look. I'm thinking the Lidingo system in white. 

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We also wanted to build them up to the ceiling to look custom with some pretty crown moulding, put in a new sink, hardware, frame out the fridge, new backsplash, new counters, put in a stainless stove and dishwasher, build a custom vent hood, put in new lighting...the works.

Then we looked at our bank account and laughed really hard. ;)

So that plan has recently become the "in a few years when we've save enough" plan. And by a few years, I'm guessing more than 2 or 3. In the meantime though, I CANNOT live in this ugly kitchen anymore. We were trying to be frugal and just deal with it, but I just can't. I need pretty things for my sanity day after day. It's a creative drain to live in a house where everything is bare and white. SO, we have begun brainstorming a new plan...which is to paint the existing cabinets, maybe add some crown to the tops, add some open shelving, change out the lighting, build a small vent hood, add hardware, and possibly add a new faucet.

I've sketched this and researched this SO many times and now I am pretty pumped! I just bought this paint sprayer, and am planning to start sanding the cabinets and painting sometime in the next month or so. I think we are painting them in Benjamin Moore Paper Mache. 

Here is some of my general inspiration for this makeover:

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Can you tell that I want to do open shelving? ;) And that's not even all of the inspiration...it's only just the tip of the iceburg. I have a zillion other kitchen pins on Pinterest.

I love these black nantucket pulls for our drawers.

And something simple like these black knobs for our lower cabinets.

And these knobs from Anthro for the 3 upper cabinets we're planning to leave up.

We will do open shelving on almost the entire wall above the sink (but will leave the uppers on either side of the stove). I want to do natural looking shelves, not painted or anything (we'll probably stain them with danish oil), and I want to use pretty brackets similar to these, also from Anthropologie. (I would like something black though, I think.) 

We are planning to leave the open shelving even when we gut the rest of the kitchen, so I'm willing to invest a bit more in that. Cannot wait to get them styled!

I'm not positive if we'll do a backsplash right now, since I would hate to rip it up when we gut the kitchen down the road, but if we need to we'll probably just throw some beadboard up, since it's timeless and cheap. 

I can't wait for a new faucet (and would LOVE a new farmhouse sink too, but we're trying to save money...), but I love this one from Ikea:

(We need a single-hole faucet to fit our current sink or else I would go with something more elaborate.)

For the vent hood, I'm trying to coax Bryan is building something like the one in this picture...(a mini version)

He acts like he's not excited...but I know he's secretly looking forward to it :)

So there's that. I need to end this novel of a post now, but I'm excited to get started! (Along with the zillion other projects we have halfway started, haha!) Also, I painted the fireplace last week! Well, just primed it. But I'm hoping to get it completely done by the end of the weekend. And I finally got curtains for the living room! I am excited to share those as well.

Have a great day!! Thanks for reading through the mess of my head.