Kitchen Countertops

Probably the most difficult decision for me during our kitchen renovation was picking out a countertop. In fact, if you take a look at the kitchen planning post I didn't even have a countertop in my moodboard. The challenge I was facing was deciding whether or not to go with white, grey, or black. I wanted to keep the kitchen neutral in every aspect and the countertops were no exception. As long as the kitchen was "plain" I can spruce it up with accessories that could be easily interchangable if my taste changed. 

Making it even harder to chose a countertop were all these gorgeous photos of kitchens I had saved in my Houzz.

Like these simple snowy kitchens with white countertops:

Traditional Kitchen by South San Francisco General Contractors Dijeau Poage Construction

Traditional Kitchen by Seattle Architects & Designers Bosworth Hoedemaker

Eclectic Kitchen by Hopewell Kitchen & Bath Designers William V. Noval

Or these white kitchens covered in a cloudy kitchen surface:

Contemporary Kitchen by San Francisco Interior Designers & Decorators Amoroso Design

Traditional Kitchen by Charleston Photographers Matthew Bolt Graphic Design

Modern Kitchen by San Francisco Architects & Designers Feldman Architecture, Inc.

Or these black countertops that do just enough to spice up a white design:

Transitional Kitchen by Bronxville Interior Designers & Decorators Rajni Alex Design

Traditional Kitchen by Toronto Design-Build Firms Bravehart Building

Contemporary Kitchen by Sonoma Architects & Designers Amy A. Alper

Aren't they all beautiful?! Which one is your favorite? On top of that we were checking our options with two countertop installers and comparing them to Ikea. Ikea became an option once we saw the array of choices they had while we were amidst planning the kitchen. Some of which were extremely affordable like the butcher block they sell. You can buy a huge 6 foot piece for $59! And they come in darker colors like this. Ikea's stone countertops range around $60-$70 per square foot. They sell mostly granite from what we checked out.

So after doing some price comparison between both countertop installers, we went with Master Kitchen & Bath from Hempstead, NY. I dropped in to see what they had. Many of the choices they had were granite and I just wasn't really into the look of them. I immediately drifted towards a pile of sample that were exactly what I was thinking of. I wanted to keep it white with a sparkly look. And I found these!

Both are quartz samples. Lucky for me they were both on sale too! The installer explained to me that normally their quartz is pricier than granite. And quartz can sustain heat and stains. Which was perfect. I never had a kitchen with stone countertops so I'm not used to constant care to make sure you don't ruin them. So once he told me that I was definitely sold! 

After measuring how much countertop we had to get it cost about $575. We only needed two 4' x 4' pieces which would go on both sides of the farmer sink from Ikea. We needed a little sliver piece about 1" thick for between the pantry cabinet and the stove. An Ikea representative advised that would be neccessary so the gas range wouldn't end up burning the side of the pantry. 

Installation was smooth and simple. They were able to get it done within an hour and thankfully our measuring matched up perfectly. 

And They're Up!

As soon as the kitchen walls were painted I was so eager to get those Ikea cabinets in. You can read more about how we narrowed our cabinet choice down here.

I don't know exactly how to put this, but let me paint a picture. Tony and I move in about a month before we even have kitchen walls. We've been eating out so much that I can't stand another individual packaged meal. Our cat Alby (whom we treat like our own son) is still living at my parents house because we still don't have kitchen walls. Fast forward a few weeks and the walls are up and painted. We get our floors installed by Lowe's. We pick a ceramic wood look tile which I forgot to mention earlier. Sorry I don't have pictures of the floors done.

Now I'm standing in a room which is our kitchen and the next step is to assemble and install the cabinets. I'm nervous. I have never put a kitchen together. How the heck are we going to do this? It can't be that hard... can it!? Oh dear lord, please guide us in the right direction. I hope we're doing the right thing. All of that is on my mind, but I'm not vocalizing it because if I tell Tony there will be two people freaking out.

Now, after purchasing all of our cabinets at Ikea we haul them into our car and drive 10 minutes down the road back home. They sat in a spare room for about a week before we dive right into it. Tony and I count through all the boxes and compare it to the item list we got from Ikea with our receipt. We have to make sure everything is there so we don't panic later when everything is laying across the kitchen floor outside it boxes.

Thankfully assembling them were not bad at all! We started with all four wall cabinets. Probably the easiest route to go since they have to go up first on the wall. Soon enough my dad helped me get them up!

That's a "oh-my-god-I'm-so-happy-they're-finally-up-and-I-still-have-my-hair!" face. See, the thing is we followed the Ikea instructions step by step. All went smooth until we realized that although the instructions stated to hang the cabinets 83 7/8" inches off the floor it looked like the space between the wall cabinets and where the base cabinets would be was too small. So I panicked. And as a result we undid everything we patiently got done. Meaning we had to unscrew the suspension rail (used to hang the cabinets) off the wall studs in which we already secured so tightly so as to make certain nothing would fall. Pain. In. The. Butt. But it had to be done. So we hung the wall cabinets about 4 inches higher than expected. This allowed about 20" between the wall and base cabinets. 

Everything else sort of flowed right into place as soon as we overcame that hurdle. We were able to put in the pantry cabinet and the base cabinet. Right after, Tony installed the doors in too. We picked the Ikea Adel off-white doors. Following that, the stove and dishwasher slid into place to make sure my measuring was correct. I did all my planning on the Ikea Kitchen Planner, but of course we had to double check. It fit right in. 

So at this point we're moving right along. We got a bunch of installing done in one day and the rest would be pretty simple to finish. 

You can see in the picture above that since the wall cabinets were hung a few inches higher than normal the pantry cabinet was standing lower than the rest. I plan to add molding or trim to the top to make it all look cohesive. 

You can imagine my excitement at this point. My dad and Tony ended the night by installing the stove and refridgerator so at least we can start cooking our own food. We have never wanted to cook so badly in our life. The next big necessity was getting the sink in to wash dishes and what not. But one step at a time. Miracles don't happen overnight. I wish.

Mum's The Word

Chrysanthemum's that is. We've officially entered fall and were just on time to change the flowers for the season. This is how the front yard was looking for the summer right before I changed it:

Just at the beginning of summer I planted petunias and impatiens. I have to admit, this is not the best that we had our flowers. I really don't think Tony and I tended to the flowers appropriately. They continued to grow just with less and less blossoms. I hope this season we have a different outcome with our fall season flowers.

Before anything I had to get my hands dirty. I pulled out all the flowers planted earlier in the season. Along with those there were some flowering bulbs that I also decided to dig up. If you look back at the picture above there are plants growing under the right window. One of them was Gladiolus flowers. I dug up whatever I could find and saved them in a plastic bag.

I picked up red chrysanthemum's to put in the ground. Three on each side. Here they are planted.

The pots were empty because when I picked up the red ones I didn't have room in my car and didn't want them to get squished or ruined. Tony has the bigger car so we ran back out right then and grabbed 4 white mums to plant in the pots.

Much better! How cute are chrysanthemums?! They're a fav.

And here's a side view.

I think we're going to get some black mulch to cover the dirt. It'll help make it look neater. Can't wait for these babies to get rounder and fuller.

Little Lovely Looks

I've decided to share my Instagram account for your viewing pleasure. In addition to DIY-ing our house, I have a passion for makeup. I've been sharing some of my looks and makeovers since earlier this year. You can check it out by clicking on the photos in my sidebar. Enjoy!

Let There Be Color

Mmmm, but not too much color. We painted the walls grey, but that's no surpise if you read my Kitchen Planning post. I'm kind of obsessed with gray. (It was the color I insisted Tony and his best man wear at our wedding... Anyway, back to the paint.) I definitely wanted a neutral color in the main areas of the house and thought grey was perfect. I saw so many pictures of gray walls with wood floors too so I was hooked. I mean aren't these rooms so pretty?!

Traditional Kitchen by Charleston Kitchen & Bath Designers Gaylord Design LLC

Contemporary Kitchen by Calgary Interior Designers & Decorators Bruce Johnson & Associates Interior Design

I’m not new to gray walls though. In our previous house our bedroom was painted gray- Behr’s Porpoise to be exact. I never got tired of that color. In fact I was convinced it made me sleep better at night. I could totally be imagining that, but I’ll believe whatever gives me a good night’s sleep! Again, because it was a “modern” neutral color I was obsessed with it. By “modern” I mean not the usual beige. I wasn’t very detailed with our décor then but anything we did have in our room always felt like it belonged there with that paint color. The gray walls never made anything seem wrong. It all just worked.

As soon as the walls we’re up in both our kitchen and living room Tony and I stopped by our local paint store Aboff’s for a Benjamin Moore color. Our plan was to make the house flow so we were careful in picking our living room/kitchen color. I wanted it to be gray, lighter and easier to match up other colors in the other rooms (which would most likely have more “personality”). I pulled out a million swatches of gray paints and lined them all up. We started narrowing it down and Tony picked the best option ever- Benjamin Moore’s San Antonio Gray. I didn’t even realize how perfect it was until we started painting the walls.

The floors weren't installed yet at this point so the concrete slab doesn't help justify the beauty of the color. The slab is sort of washing the color out in this picture. However, painting the walls from primed white walls to any color at all sent my heart fluttering. Life! Our house is starting to have its own life! To finally see some color on the walls after months of renovating was so thrilling! It was becoming easier for me to imagine these rooms put together.

There are so many gray color paints out there that it can definitely send your head spinning. Don’t be alarmed. I must say that it’s pretty hard to mess up gray. Just remember these things that I picked up when we were searching for the right color. You can narrow down grey paint colors in these three groups:

• True Gray - these shades of gray often have no undertone to soften or cool it. Think of it this way; only black and white were mixed to make this color. If it looks like another color may have been mixed in then it’s not a true gray.
• Warm Grays - these shades are softer and “cozier”. Imagine gray with a splash of taupe in it. It’s a little more muddier and earthy.
• Cool Gray - these shades might have blue or purple undertone. If you look at it long enough you’ll notice it might resemble a muted blue color, or a very shaded purple.

You can check out some of these blogs for some great posts with more details about gray paint:

• Centsational Girl - Favorite Gray Paint Colors
• Love, Pomergranate House - How-to Pick The Perfect Gray Paint
• Young House Love - Going Gray

Here's one more picture of the walls. It's not a great picture so I aplogize. This was taken a little later in the eveing when the sun was going down, but you the way the color reads in this picture is more true to the actual color. Unfortunately I didn't get picture of the kitchen painted before the cabinets were hung. There wasn't too much color in the kitchen anyway since we left most of  wall unpainted since we knew the cabinets would cover it up anyway. 

(P.S. Its been about 4 months since we've painted and live with San Antonio Gray... and I still LOVE it! This is definitely going into the books as a can't-go-wrong paint choice.)

Kitchen Walls

Last I left off with the kitchen; our contractor Daniel started putting up wall studs and setting up new electrical units. The kitchen previously has flourescent lighting which I highly dislike. I'm sure I'm not the only one who thinks flourescent lighting reminds them of cold boring corporate offices. Anyway, we decided we wanted to have 4 high hats installed with a dimmer.

Electrical finished up pretty fast and they were soon installing the sheet rock fast and steady.

Before I knew it, it was ready for painting.

You can see that we had floors installed too! Since the first floor was getting new laminate chocolate colored floors I wanted the kitchen to have a similar color. I was seeing lots of pictures of the ceramic tile that resembled wood like this picture and this picture. Thankfully we found a super affordable option at Lowes for $2.48 per square foot. This was about half the price of a similar looking tile I found at The Tile Shop.

We hired Lowe's to do the job too. I discovered that if I signed up on lowes.com I could receive a 10% off coupon for new homeowners. So we were also able to save there too!

So with the walls up and the floor installed we were getting closer to putting the kitchen together. Closer to finally eating our own cooked meals! At this point Tony and I were doing so much eating out that I was dyyyyyying to have my own stove to actually cook for ourselves. Now, I'm not one who yearns to cook everyday. I'd hire a chef if I could, but there's nothing better than being able to cook a nice home cooked meal. So this girl was aching and itching to get the kitchen done. One day at a time... one day at a time. =]

Curb Appeal

This is one of the first pictures I took after we finally closed on our house. It was around the end of winter when we started work. Perfect timing to start prepping our lawn for spring. 

Fast forward a few months this is what our house is looking like now:

We had the large tree on the left completely removed and moved one of the bushes in its place. It happened to be an azalea bush which I always wanted! So that was exciting. The two bushes by the front door were trimmed down and the largest bush which was closest to the driveway we  removed completely. You can't tell from the before picture, but we also had a large tree that sat between our neighbor's house and our house cut down. It was pretty close to both houses so we decided to get rid of it.

We replaced the old worn out red shutters with shiny black ones. I was more focused on doing larger projects at the time, but Tony insisted on getting them immediately. And he was absolutely right. It made the house seem brighter and cleaner. Here's what it looked like when we got the old ones off. (Check out all those daffodils that sprung up too!)

My dad helped him out. Hard men at work!

We had the front door replace with one we found at Home Depot. We still need to get a storm door for the front, but we always use our side door so in the mean time we're good with just the front door.

Lastly, with all the tree removal and bush replacing that I mentioned before we had to plant new grass for those dirt patches. We did hire the best landscaper EVER! Tony and I don't know what it is, but ever since he's been tending to our lawn the grass has blossomed into some of the brightest green grass I have ever seen. Seriously, all our friends who come over instantly say the same thing. "You're grass is so nice! It's sod." But nope. Its ours.

There are some things I have on my mind to add to our curb appeal.

• Adding pavers to each side of the front door walkway
• Adding flowers around the azalea bush
• Replacing the mailbox
• Adding a new storm door
• Creating an edge for the flowers beds in front of the windows
• Possibly adding some smaller along the house towards the back of the flower beds

I'm sure more things will come up in time. So far I couldn't be happier how our curb appeal is looking nowadays.