Back to the kitchen with you, woman!

After much agonizing and "no, you make the decision," "no, you make the decision," we've changed our minds about which contractor we'll be using. After we both agreed on the mid-range price company, we both 'fessed up that we actually wanted the high-end kitchen design company to do the work, but for various reasons thought we "should" pick the other guys. So now we're going with the expensive folks, who paradoxically seem the most willing to tell me, "You totally can't afford that on your budget." I think we've managed to impress upon our designer that we really, really like our budget, and she's willing to work with us to find ways to get a nice kitchen for that amount. It's not going to have solid gold sinks and marble countertops, but that's not really our style, anyway.

This is at the top of my mind today because I had an initial design consultation with the company this morning, where we sat down for two solid hours picking out sinks, counters, faucets, knobs, paint possibilities, etc. Meanwhile, Liza was sitting in a chair the whole time, mostly behaving herself while watching videos and only occasionally interrupting our discussion to snot all over everything or throw Corian samples at the glass wall. Yes, I know I owe her for this one.

I've been a bit stalled on the kitchen design/decision making process, I think partly because I was worried that the compromises we were going to have to make to stay within our budget were going to lead to a kitchen that I wasn't going to be happy with. I can live with an unhappy kitchen, I just don't want to spend tens of thousands of dollars to get it. We're in kind of a weird situation because we actually have more money than we want to spend on the kitchen, so it's not like we can say, "Well, we can't do that, because the bank won't give us more money." No, we're just trying not to over-improve the house buy installing a kitchen that's worth 25% of the total value of the house, and we're trying to keep a nice cushion in case we suddenly need to replace a car (or replace a furnace ... or visit Antarctica for Chrismas). So we have a budget that we know we should stick to, but there's nobody to police us except ourselves.

Anyway, I think the design dam broke this morning, because all of the sudden I was able to figure out what I wanted and we managed to find it in things that should hopefully fall in our budget. And when we got all of the decisions made (they're still open to change, if budget or taste requires, but these are what our initial estimate will be based on), I was really happy with the result.

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I've been having a hard time finding an inspiration for the kitchen design - you know, something I can plunk down and say, okay, all of our colors are coming out of this piece of fabric, or this painting, or whatever. I've been pulling photos out of magazines and brochures, but all of them tended to be "I like the floor" or "I like the backsplash," not "I love this whole kitchen." The closest I had to a design inspiration was, I like transparent glass tiles, and I want slate in the entryway of the house and maybe we can carry it into the kitchen, too.

After I finished redoing our guest room, I found a bag of "sea glass" in the floral section at Michael's, and I picked it up for possible future use in a vase or candle holder in the room. But as I weeded through the photos of kitchens I liked, I kept finding pictures of white cabinets and various blues for the walls and counters. Bingo - informal beach cottage it is.

(not my photos - I got it from somebody's ebay listing, but the colors are about right)

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One of the reasons we chose to go with this design company is because, after initially expressing some doubt that we could get the kitchen we wanted with our budget, the designer called me several days later to ask if I had thought about using Ikea cabinets. They had used Ikea cabinets in another remodel, and she was impressed with both their style and their low price. I was impressed that she had heard of Ikea. None of the other contractors we talked to had even heard of them, much less worked with them, and most said they would not be willing to use cabinets from an unknown source. I was also impressed to find that she was still thinking about our situation a few days after a brief "get to know the company" discussion. I was so impressed, actually, that I shoved the kid in the car and drove to Pittsburgh that day to take a look at the cabinets in person.

I had briefly checked out Ikea's cabinets on previous visits, but this time I was able to spend a little more time checking out the construction and the features, as well as checking out the door styles in person. I know that Ikea stuff has sort of a reputation as being "first apartment" furniture, but the stuff wears like iron - my parents are still using an armoire they bought for me in high school, a piece that has been moved to two apartments in the US, three houses in the US, and one apartment in Japan. And we're still using two sets of bookcases we bought for our first apartment back in 1995. So I have no doubt that the Ikea kitchen stuff will last as well as whatever we could afford from Home Depot ... that stuff is all made of particle board and plywood, anyway, they just have solid wood doors - and so do some of the Ikea styles.

I found three or four door styles that I liked, I picked up their kitchen planning guides and price list, and when I got home I downloaded their online kitchen planner. I've been playing around with it on and off, using it to try out layouts of cabinets and appliances. Since the cabinet boxes are standard sizes, even if we don't go with Ikea it's nice to be able to look at 3D renderings of a design to see if it's hideous or stupid. Plus, the program adds up all of the pieces you've got in the design, and you can immediately see the price difference if you take out a cabinet or swap a set of drawers for a door with shelves. And, hey - a whole kitchen chock full of cabinets for about $3500? One-third the price of the Home Depot quote we got. Of course, that doesn't include some of the nifty interior fittings, which have to be purchased separately, but I don't think we'll have more than a couple hundred dollars of Rationell stuff, if that much. Oh, and one more benefit - some styles of Ikea cabinets are in stock, and the rest can be ordered within two weeks. Compared with the 6-8 week lead time for conventional cabinets, Ikea's looking better all the time.

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So now that we've decided on the contractor, we've pretty much settled on which door style we want from Ikea - the humorously named "Lidingo" which I can't convince my computer to umlaut on the final "o." Every time I have to say it, I have to fight back the urge to start talking about how dingoes ate my baby. Must - not - quote - Seinfeld ...

Anyway, it's basically a white raised-panel door - very conventional looking, and not at all the super-sleek minimalist style a lot of people associate with Ikea. You can see photos of somebody's finished Dingo Kitchen at http://www.ikeafans.com/FINLidingo.htm

And yes, I chose similar cup pulls for the drawers, with coordinating round knobs with a raised spiral on the front for the doors. Relatively boring chrome faucet with a lever handle and an integrated sprayer (where the head of the regular faucet is on a hose and can pull out to be a sprayer, rather than the sprayer being a separate item). There's nothing wrong with it, and it's several hundred dollars cheaper than the ones I'm more partial too, so this might be one of the areas where I'm willing to compromise. Oh, and we'll be ditching the cover plate at the bottom and mounting in a single hole.

We're getting pricing on a nifty sink they have in their showroom - it's some sort of quartz blend something or other that doesn't stain, and best of all, doesn't show the least little bit of water spots when it dries. I don't know the name, or I'd post photos of that, too. But the decision I'm most excited about is the counters - I loooooove the Corian that we picked out. http://www.corian.com/corian/b/en/c/Colors/ColorDetailAqua.html

That's "Aqua," in case anyone wants to find it at their local retailer. Love, love, love this. We may not actually be able to afford Corian, but there are so many millions of colors of laminate, I'm sure we can find something similar if we have to economize here. But in the meantime, I'm going to bed with a smile on my face thinking of my lovely white cabinets with my lovely aqua counters ...


I'll post a rough sketch of the current best guestimate as to the cabinet arrangement soon ... and wait until I tell you about our plan for tiling the backsplash. Oh, it's cool ... and I think I get to use my glass tiles! Not many of them (at $60 for a square foot of 1" squares, there's a good reason to ration them), but they'll be there!


In summary - love the designer, love the decisions so far, would like to wake up tomorrow and find the work all done and ready to move in. Please?