A Quasi-Dream Kitchen

I hope everyone had a nice weekend!

Daniel and I meant to begin demolition in our "before" kitchen, but ended up fixing the truck as well as finalizing design plans. We solicited a bid for remodeling work from a good friend of ours with a construction company (his head carpenter does great work, and if you are interested, contact me!)  Anyway, they bid at $10,000 for doing the work that we are perfectly capable of doing ourselves, it's just they can do it faster and correctly the first time. We decided to forgo speed and efficiency in favor of saving $10k.

Want to see our design choices? Here goes:

Here is a rendition of our kitchen via the IKEA kitchen planner (a wonderful tool for planning out your kitchen, if you're going with IKEA cabinets).  Through the end of November, they are offering a discount of 15% if you spend $3500 or more, and 20% if you spend $4500 or more on cabinetry.

The view below is looking in from the living room.  The tall white spot is the fridge, and ignore the white stove on the far right.  It actually fits in the space behind the breakfast bar (which are the tall floor cabinets in front) but the site isn't smart enough to let me place it there.

Beautiful... plus a breakfast bar. I can finally eat off a surface other than a sofa pillow.

Here's another view looking in from the side.  The sink is on the left and we chose a dishwasher with a matching wood panel in front to blend in.

Next up is our floor tile choice. I have fallen in love with these rectangular 12 x 24 inch tiles that have a grassy pattern on them.  This is a tile in a cool grey color, which actually has a few shots of colors through it but remains neutral.  We think it is a nice contrast to the cherry finish we're selecting for the cabinets.

We even went to a free tile installation class in Sodo on Saturday morning to learn how to become little Bob Vilas.

And finally, here is our selection for countertops.  We figured we could use higher quality finishes because we have such a small kitchen (roughly 8 x 12 - ish).  This is "Blue Pearl" granite. If you look closely, you can see opalescent shots of blue throughout the dark grey - we both agreed it was quite lovely, and provided a good contrast to the expanse of cherry cabinetry.

I'm excited to have much more storage space in the new cabinets, as well as a rockin' Jenn-Air gas stove I bought on Craigslist.  We're next headed to a refurbished appliance center on Aurora to scope out the stainless steel refrigerators.  But first, we buttoned up the truck (and cried uncle) because Daniel just couldn't wrench out the heater core. The massive V10 engine heads block any easy access to the heater core tubes on the engine bay side of the firewall. Sigh.  Luckily, we were able to return most of the supplies we bought for the repair (Daniel wanted to keep the heater core & give it to the mechanics to install). 

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A quick knitting update: I'm done with the cabling pattern on the Snapdragon mitts. Pictures soon!