Kitchen cabinets installed!!!

Today was a very exciting day for us. We went back to the house--which is a bit more of a drive now that we're settled in our apartment--to the mostly finished installation of our kitchen cabinets! It's not completely done because there are a few electrical issues that need to be addressed before the front panel of the outer island goes on, and the marble top baking center will be added in a few weeks with the rest of the countertop, but other than that, our kitchen cabinets are installed!

As a little background, I love to cook so the kitchen was a top priority to me. Since I live with a brain injury, we put a lot of thought into using as much universal design as we can afford. The floors will be cork for greater sound proofing, which means my son will finally be able to have playdates. (Hardwood floors are terrible for my headaches. So happy to be rid of them!). We'll have extra wide halls, rockers instead of light switches, levers and pulls instead of knobs, a raised dishwasher, lots of drawers for base cabinets, touch activiated faucets, etc. We tend toward function over form, but really wanted an accessible kitchen that was more transitional/modern than nursing home!

This was our rendering as of several months ago. We've made a few changes.The command center in the nook is a little different, with open shelves on top, and doing away with the desk extension on the left. We've also added arches over the command center and wall by the frig into the mudroom. The pantry door will be espresso framed with frosted glass. This view is from the dinette.

Rendering:

Reality:
I see that I need to go back and get a better shot. The first picture is from December 15, the second picture is from the 14th. The legs on the first picture show approximately where the open lowed baking center will be.

Here's the view from the great room. The big change here is that we took down the wall with open shelves to take advantage of all the fantastic natural light from the dinette.

Rendering:

Reality:

This view is from the command center, looking into the dinette and great room. Again, the only change is the wall with the open shelves is gone.

Rendering:

Reality:

 

And now for a little detail.

The cabinet are solid maple shaker style with espresso stain. They look almost black, but they are really a rich brown. This is pretty color-accurate. 

 All of the drawers are full extension, including these super wide drawers by the baking center. 

All the drawers and cabinets are soft close with Blumotion, another way to reduce noise in the house.

Joe Yoder did a fabulous job. We are so impressed with his quality. The dovetails are perfectly smooth.

The shelves are perfectly smooth and lined up with the frames.

Hardware. We chose pulls over knobs for ease of use as we age in place.

Molding:

Frig surround. We chose to keep the top open rather than put doors on because I'm only 5'4" and have never used a cabinet above my frig. Instead, I'l have two baskets, one for our first aid kit and one with our cleaning supplies (out of the reach of our toddler). 

Next to the frig is a stack of drawers. We made the second drawer a bread drawer because I love to make bread, and Niels love to eat bread! (He can go through a loaf every day or so!)

Continuing left is the cooktop, with three big drawers underneath it. The top drawer is a shallow one, which I"ll use for spices and wooden spoons. The other two drawers and nice and deep for pots and pans.

Next up is a row of cubbies for my cooking oils and wines. This was my cabinet maker's idea for the space instead of a dead space filler. I love it!

On either side of the cooktop we have upper cabinets with frosted glass. They're still a bit dusty.

One thing I really appreciated is the way the glass is sealed. In our last kitchen, our glass cabinets rattled whenever you closed them. Between the soft close and the seal, it's nice and quiet!

In the corner, we have a lazy susan.

I didn't take a good picture, but here is (part of) the corner cabinet above the lazy susan:

 Next to the lazy susan is the microwave drawer with deep drawer underneath. There's also a cabinet above the counter.

Next to the microwave is the double oven, which is a nice height for me, that is, lower than a typical double oven. This allowed room for racks above it for storing cookie trays and cutting boards. There's also a small drawer below for my bread pans.

Next to the wall ovens is a bank of drawers that I'll use for all my baking things. The drawers turned up a lot wider that I had imagined, so there's a good chance that I may use a drawer for our board games or our son's toys. The top of the counter will be the new home for my brand new Kitchen Aid mixer. I've wanted one forever, and Niels found a killer deal on Black Friday. Instead of the full wall with open shelves we originally planned, it'll be a half wall into the dinette. We needed the half wall for the Kitchen Aid's outlet.

Next to the bank of drawers will be my open lowered baking center. We designed it to accommodate a wheelchair, if needed.  But we can always use it for kneading dough and rolling out cookies--which I'll now be able to do without standing on my tippy toes! And, there's room for our son (and a friend) to help! We were planning to put the same quartz on the baking center as the rest of the counter, with a piece of marble on my wishlist for someday. An unexpected surprise is that when we looked at remnants for the bathroom vanities, we found a slab of carrara marble that was just the size we needed.

The inner island will be my prep island. Here's a view of it from the cooktop side. From the left, there's the recycling center, in the middle is an adjustable shelf that once again makes clever use of some dead space. I'll use this space for paper towels and wipes. On the right will be the prep sink with a tip out drawer and cabinet below.

This is the other side of the prep island. There are two banks of drawers where we'll keep most of our dishes, and then rest of the recycling center. You can see the built in dividers for utensils and silverware in the top drawers.

View of the utensil drawer:

This is our touch-activated recycling center. It uses Blumotion. It is a much improved version of the idea I got at Ikea about a year ago.

Here's the inside of the recycling center. The two bins on the bottom are for trash and glass/plastic recycling. The top drawer will hold two baskets, one for paper recycling and one for odd recycling, like light bulbs and batteries. We wanted to make it really easy for family and friends to recycle by having everything in one place.

This is the Blum servodrive that opens the recycling center with a gentle push.

Finally, this is the entertainment/clean-up island. From the right, there's a bank of drawers, single bowl sink cabinet and dishwasher. We raised it a little bit to make it easier to unload.

Both sinks have Rev-a-shelf tip out drawers for my gramma's scrubbies.

This is the outside of the entertainment island. We'll have three bar stools here.

The panel for the outside island isn't installed yet because there are a few electrical tweaks that need to happen first. 

The command center should be installed in a few weeks, and the pantry furniture will be moved in after painted.

I can't wait to get cooking!

We sold the previous house...

When do you start building your new house? Some people wait until the previous house is sold, others keep both and rent it out. We landed in the middle and started about 3 months into having our house on the market. We were fortunate that four months later we actually sold the previous house.

The previous house was a beautiful house, only 7 years old and truly move-in ready but not condusive to my wife's TBI. We did a lot of work to stage it and all the comments on the house were extremely positive. However, it still took - get ready for this - 55 (yes, fifty-five) showings before we finally got the offer.

Once you have the right buyer however things go quickly, we got the first offer at noon and 3 rounds of negotiations later we agreed on a price only 10 hours later. We closed on the house on December 12 and were out of the house two days later. Since the dream house isn't yet done we are now staying in an apartment as the proud owners of only 1 house!

And to tell you the truth... the real estate market is for the dogs! We're done, we've got our dream house...

Finalized Paint Colors

Yesterday I met with Sue, our interior designer, to finalize our paint colors. This was by far the most difficult set of choices for me to make, especially since my eyes have been giving me problems all year. We knew the general color scheme we wanted, but Sue was a great help in narrowing down to the final selections. 

The only thing I was reasonable sure of as we got started was that I wanted to use Sherwin Williams Oyster Bay as our green because it went so well with our tile (Solistone Mardi Gras in Carrollton) and quartz (Hanstone Specchio White). 

Here's a look at Oyster Bay using Sherwin Williams Room Visualizer. It's a really pretty grayish-green.

The first thing we did was confirm that we still liked the color in the actual kitchen. Here's Sue holding up the paint sample, backsplash, and cabinet door. Whew, I still love it! In addition to the kitchen, we'll use Oyster Bay in the dinette, pantry, in-law suite, and both laundry rooms (one upstairs and one down).

Since we have an open floor plan, we needed to make sure that the other colors worked with the Oyster Bay. Our stairwall made a good palette to narrow down the choices. I put the Oyster Bay on top, then a row of grays, then a row of plums. We were looking for one light gray, one dark gray and one deep plum.

After we took out the obvious "no's," the samples started to look like a Christmas tree. With us moving the week before Christmas, this may be our tree this year! (The sagey green on the bottom  represents our couches, and that's our carpet on the floor.

  

We landed on Mindful Gray for the light gray, and Dovetail for the darker Gray. We then went around the house deciding where to use the light and where to use the dark. Here in the foyer, we chose the light gray to go with our tile, with is the top right little square.

Niels' office will have a white chair rail with Mindful Gray on top and Dovetail on bottom.

In the Great room, we're doing the Mindful Gray in most of the room with the back wall being an accent wall with the deep plum instead of the dark gray. The plum we settled on is called Sensuous Gray.

It was so helpful to have Sue. She helped me stand in such a way that I could see how all the colors looked together. Our first floor has a lot of light, which is fabulous, but making getting true colors a challenge. But here I am under the arch looking at the gray for the great room and the Oyster Bay dinette.

We had six colors to select. With the first four being our primary colors, we had two left for our almost-three-year-old. We had read that to help a toddler's transition, the new room should be the same color as his old room. So we stuck with blue. I found a really cool vintage train bedding set for his new big boy bed, and used that to determine our paint. We chose Scanda, the one on the left, because it had the most contrast  with his comforter.

In our master bedroom, we used three of the colors. Sensuous gray in our bedroom and water closet, Dovetail in our bathroom because we have a ton of natural light, and Mindful Gray in our closet and possibly on the tray ceiling of our bedroom.

For our trim we chose Pure White, which is a bright white for contrast.

Here are all the final selections:

From left,
Sensuous Gray: master bedroom, stairwall
Mindful Gray: master bathroom, office, in-law bath, master closet, mudroom, great room
Dovetail: office, 4th bedroom
Oyster Bay: kitchen, dinette, pantry, laundry rooms, in-law suite
Solaria: D's bathroom (yellow is his favorite color), D's closet, powder room
Scanda: D's bedroom

Problem Solving: Foyer Bench

Two big lessons we've learned from this building a custom home from scratch process:

1. As much as you try to think of everything as you plan and research, there's no such thing as a perfect house. Or a perfectly finished house. Once we threw out that expectation, the process got a lot less stressful and a lot more fun. 

2. As much as you think you know what something is going to look like, you really don't until the drywall is up (or later!).

This second point leads me to the topic of this post. Our foyer bench. We are a "shoes off" in the house family. I've been this way for several years, probably starting after I bought my townhouse and was responsible for cleaning the floors. But it wasn't until I had a child crawling around that I really thought about all the disgusting things things we step in outside. And I really don't want that stuff in our house. 

Our current house doesn't have much of a foyer or mudroom, and while I was able to make a mudroom-esque area for the family entrance, it's not super convenient for guests to remove their shoes. This was something I wanted to remedy in the new house. 

On paper, it looked like we would have plenty of room for a bench. In reality, we have about 15" clearance between our niche and the front door when it is swinging open. In my vast and exhaustive search, I could only find benches that were 16" or deeper. 

Niche as is

Not enough space for a bench under the niche or behind the door.

The dilemma.

Now, it's totally my fault that it's come to this. We should have seen the issue at the dry wall stage. I blame it on my three month headache. Then I tried to ignore it. Then I looked all over for a bench that would work. Then I stressed about it. Then we finally asked our GC about taking out the niche. That's when he made the brilliant suggestion to make the bench in the niche. This actually solves two issues, because we had no idea what we were going to do with that area anyway. So, we're going to cut out the drywall from the bottom of the arch to about 18". Then our trim guy, Chris, will put in a little wood seat. Voila! Niche bench.

I can't find a picture that is exactly what we have in mind, but the three below will help describe it. As is, our niche would have been a simplified version of this:

Knap Traditional Entry via Houzz

Ideally, I would have liked storage underneath, like this.

Source: HGTV

However, since there is an outlet under the niche, it will look more like this, with the arched top. We do have a coat closet right there, so we can always put a shoe rack on the floor. I love when a plan comes together!

Reformed Nook by Happy Day

***Update***
Here's a link to the finished foyer.