Kitchen Reveal

I am so excited to finally share a full view of our kitchen with you!

*update* Our house was featured on Houzz! Read the full article here –> Houzz Tour feature 🙂

To be completely honest, this is our favorite part of the house. The kitchen has always been at the top of our priority list and I think I can safely say we achieved a dream kitchen. I talked a little bit about kitchen design in my last “fixer upper” post, so if you missed that one, you can see it here! I wanted to focus a little more on the details of the kitchen and why we chose certain things in this post.. so read on! 🙂

I’ll be throwing in some “before” pictures so you can see the transformation.. cause let’s be honest, those are fun.

Kitchen design

So as you know, our kitchen cabinets are from Ikea. If you’ve been there and have walked their entire maze of a store, you’ve probably walked by their kitchen section. It’s a dream, isn’t it? I mean, I can see myself having any of their kitchens! We did plenty of research to make sure it was a safe choice, and it all checked out. My dad was not a huge fan in the beginning, and suggested going with the regular cabinets. I wasn’t having it. I wanted modern! I wanted a kitchen I would love cooking in and using every day. So Ikea it was. You’d be surprised at how affordable it can be if you keep your options simple and are careful on what you want to spend your money on. We decided to have big drawers for most of the bottom cabinets and long horizontal wall cabinets with rising doors. To me, having drawers in place of just a large space inside a kitchen cabinet made a lot more sense as far as organization goes. Which, by the way, I’ll have to share with you very soon!

Doors & Fronts

For the cabinet fronts we did a total mix of materials and colors. I guess you can say we got a little carried away. As I’ve said before, the vision we had for the kitchen was to have a simple, modern but also very unique kitchen. Mixing all the different materials and colors was definitely a bold move but I’m beyond pleased with the results. Also, I must admit we can’t take full credit for this decision.. we took inspiration from a floor model at Ikea. This model had a similar floor plan and had a full face of stainless steel cabinets on the kitchen island, wooden fronts for the bottom cabinet drawers and horizontal wall cabinets. I mean, we were in awe at how nice everything looked. We replicated the stainless steel look for the entire section of cabinets on the kitchen island and chose a different color for the opposite side. We also got a similar wall cabinet.. because again, I was obsessed with how good it looked! Anyway we had one of our first real hiccup here.. the bottom drawer fronts we wanted were being discontinued at Ikea. Luckily, we asked about this months ahead and were able to reconsider our options. We were not huge fans of the other ones they had, and long story short, we stumbled upon Semihandmade, an amazing company that makes door fronts for Ikea cabinets. Their options are many, but we decided on their DIY Shaker option and painted them in Anchor’s Aweigh from Sherwin Williams. This was actually the color we used for the accent wall in the dining space!

We loved working with Semihandmade on this project. They are readily available and so easy to work with! We sent them our kitchen plans, which we got from the Ikea design portal, and they took care of the rest. We had no issues and are very pleased with the quality of the doors/fronts. If you’re loving Ikea cabinets, but aren’t completely sold on their door/front options, check them out! It’s such a relief to know you have more options.

Backsplash

I saw the backsplash as my chance to be creative, while keeping a cohesive look in the kitchen. As I’ve said before, my eyes always wandered to the marble tile at any store we visited. I loved the polished look, but wasn’t loving the price tag at all. On top of that, we originally wanted to cover the entire wall in tile. Imagine the price tag on that! Because backsplash was not something necessary to make the kitchen a working kitchen, we left it to the very end. I was sad because it meant I had to wait for my backsplash a little longer, but I was happy that I had more time to think about our options. So we found this amazing marble tile at Floor & Décor for about $5 per sq. ft., which was a total steal compared to the other options of marble tile at more than $10 per sq. ft.! We were also able to pick out each piece of tile ourselves, meaning we picked out a nice variety of shades. Some darker than others, so that we could achieve the exotic look I fell in love with in the first place. When we were ready to install the tile, we had our tile guy install it. I was toying around with the arrangement of the tile, but ultimately decided to just go with regular subway style.

Floating Shelves

Why did we get floating shelves? I feel like this was something we established pretty early on. I started pinning pictures of kitchens with floating shelves non stop on Pinterest, and the more I pinned, the more I knew we had to have floating shelves. Also, I was never a huge fan of the corner cabinets, which is where our shelves are. When we decided on the other wall cabinets, we immediately knew the floating shelves would work perfectly in the space we had.

Deciding on which floating shelves to get was a little more stressful. We had a several options to consider, from color, to type of wood, to thickness. We knew we weren’t huge fans of the super thick shelves, so the thinner, the better. We considered getting a large butcher block from Ikea. We got this idea from our favorite bloggers, New Darlings, who had recently renovated their kitchen and replaced all of their upper cabinets for shelves. They got a butcher block from Ikea and cut it to fit the space they had. Again, we very seriously considered this option, until my father in law suggested getting a quote for custom shelves from a carpenter he knew. So we did, and we quickly realized that it was not only cost effective, but would be a lot easier on us, being that we didn’t have to worry about mounting it. If we went with the butcher block, we would have to worry about cutting it to fit the space (remember, these are corner shelves!), and finding a good hardware set to mount the blocks, which made us very nervous. So we went with the custom shelves and all we had to do was stain them to whatever shade we wanted.

Getting the shelves custom made was the best decision we could have made. It felt like a load off when we realized we didn’t have to figure out how to get them mounted and make sure they were sturdy enough to load them up with plates and books!

Countertop

The countertop is by far my favorite part of the kitchen. I feel like it just ties everything together perfectly. The stone is quartz, which we learned is the perfect choice if you’re looking for a durable, yet low maintenance, quality stone. We knew we wanted to invest in a good countertop, so this was our go to from the very beginning. The stone we went with is called “Cosmopolitan White” from Caesar Stone, which was also sold at Ikea. We took advantage of another one of their kitchen sales when we realized their discount also applied to their countertops. We also considered buying a slab from a warehouse and having someone install it, but we realized the cost of this would quickly add up. When you buy a precut slab at a warehouse, you can save a ton of money but you’re pretty much on your own. You have to measure everything out yourself, find someone that can install it and on top of that be okay with the options they have available. Also, you need to keep in mind that if you are even a few inches shy from getting everything you need with one slab, you’ll need to buy another full slab. Yes, you can use the rest of it wherever you want, like in your bathroom, but like I said before.. the costs add up very quickly! We’re so happy with our choice and I thought I’d never say this but.. I love cleaning my countertop! There are no ugly stains and keeping it nice and shiny is super easy.

before

after

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before

after

I know I covered a lot of information, but believe me there’s even more I left out! I could go on and on and on about the kitchen! I wanted to include as many references as possible, so below you’ll see a few links to some of the things you see in our kitchen. I also wanted to include a few references to pictures/articles that inspired us during this process.

GREVSTA (stainless steel) Fronts | RINGHULT (glossy white) Fronts | Semihandmade DIY Shaker Fronts | Wayfair Drawer Pulls | Wayfair Pendant Lights  | Wayfair Bar stools | Floor & Décor Marble Tile 

 

New Darlings Blog – The Kitchen Reveal  (I love everything about their home! As I mentioned earlier.. we almost took the idea of using a butcher block from Ikea like they did for their floating shelves.)

Sarah Sherman Samuel Blog – Kitchen before & after

B Repurposed Blog – Modern Navy Laundry Room Reveal (they used the same color we used to paint the cabinet fronts, so it totally gave me a boost of confidence when picking this color for the kitchen!)

 

If you have any comments or questions, please let me know! I’d love to help if you’re going through this journey as well. Thank you so much for stopping by!