Kitchen Inspiration

It's been a difficult few weeks around here.  Unfortunately both of our grandmothers passed away two weeks ago, just two days apart.  It was an extremely emotional time for both of us, but with the support of our family and friends we were able to pull together and get through it.

In between the visitations and funerals, we also had our first home study visit from CAS.  We are now done the classes and are feeling really excited about having the home study part done soon as well.  If all goes according to plan, that will all be done by the end of January.

We have been working on the mudroom and are at the point now where we are ready to do some drywalling.  We have been planning on working on the kitchen over the holidays though, and realized that we might as well do the mudroom and kitchen at the same time to keep the dust at a minimum.

The current layout of our kitchen is really impractical.  The oven and cooktop are separated from the fridge and sink by a peninsula that cuts the kitchen in half.  There is also a lot of wasted space that we are hoping to gain back.  There aren't any windows, but there are 4 doors and a stairwell which means that wall space is minimal.

It's currently dark, outdated and dingy looking.  The wallpaper was probably hung in the early 90's and the cabinets are about 30 years old.  We have lived with it for a year and a half, but we're ready to make some changes!

Once we had our layout figured out, we went to Ikea and used their kitchen design software to see if our ideas would actually work.  Within an hour we had our design done and we were starting to look at cabinets.

Our plan is to have two straight walls of cabinets with a narrow island down the middle.  We want it to be lighter, brighter and cleaner looking.  Something like the pictures below:

Forbes.com

themagnoliamom.com

  

cdn.homedit.com

centsationalgirl.com

Without any windows, our space will never be as bright and airy as most of these ones, but with white cabinets and additional lighting we are hoping to brighten it up as much as we can.

We started demo today.  The cabinets are out, the walls are down and the appliances are gone.  I'll write more about that in the next post, but for now...it's back to ripping flooring out and cleaning the mess up!