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I can't believe it's already the end of May, which means I only have one more month to get everything ready for our phase one kitchen remodel! We're keeping a lot of our existing kitchen, but it's still the biggest project we've ever tackled, and it's alll new territory. We've never knocked down a wall, built a kitchen island, or done any work to a kitchen at all. So we're nervous and a little bit overwhelmed! Did I mention we only have one month to get it all done? We're starting the last weekend of June and our goal is to have everything done by the end of July. Aaaahh!!! In the meantime, we've been getting all our ducks in a row, and we finally have a plan that we both feel good about! The last time I wrote about this, I was trying to decide what to do with our oak cabinets. Keep them, paint them, or tear them out and start fresh? Ideally I would have loved to start fresh, but I knew that would trigger needing new counters, which would add several thousands of dollars. Painting turned out to be quite expensive and we didn't want to DIY. So we decided to keep the oak. Our goal for this phase one update is to get the wall torn down and the open layout we want, while spending as little money as possible. That means the lower cabinets are staying as-is, with a little bit of rearranging. We both felt good about that, but we could NOT figure out how to rearrange the upper cabinets. Long story short, no matter what there would've been some weird gaps and it would've looked janky. At first, I thought open shelves were the obvious solution, but Ben really did not want them. Sooo, our plan is...
Inspiration photo via Better Homes & Gardens
A two-tone kitchen! We'll have oak lower cabinets and white upper cabinets. But instead of painting the uppers like I originally thought, we are getting NEW white upper cabinets that will match the island and the pantry cabinets. That way, we can order exactly what we need to make it fits just right without any weird gaps. I think it's going to be great! Eventually, we will update the lower cabinets to the same white cabinets so the whole kitchen will match. In the meantime...it's not going to be as pretty as the photo above. We won't have a backsplash, and we'll still be rocking our laminate counters. But it'll look okay (or oak-ay haha) and it'll allow us to get the layout we want without going over budget. It's a perfect short-term solution.
...and by short-term, I mean a few years. I had one person suggest to me that we take out a loan or a line of credit so we can get the whole kitchen done now, rather than stretching it out into two phases. Trust me, I'm tempted by that. I can even see the reason in it--doing everything in one fell swoop ensures that all the cabinets match perfectly. There's a risk that if we wait, the ones we choose will be discontinued or will change slightly. But we are very determined to only pay cash for home improvements, even if it means we can't do everything we want to, when we want to. So this phase one kitchen won't be my DREAM kitchen (yet). It won't be all over Pinterest. You might not be very impressed by the before & afters. But it WILL be on budget. At least, I hope so!!
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