Quick Update On Our New House's Kitchen

Our kitchen that came with the apartment,
before it was finished being installed

In the end we decided to not take the carpenter who came, for a variety of reasons, mostly technical ones, but costs factored in as well. Second hand kitchens won't end up working for our specific space either.

I don't have much time to write now, but I just came back from an Ikea trip with my friend Michelle, the one who is very good with design and beauty. We planned our kitchen and got a price quote, and I'm really excited about what we designed.

The biggest reason I'm glad I went with Michelle is because I have a specific taste when it comes to aesthetics, but I am not always aware of what I want and like, I just know when I don't like something, and then I just start resenting what I have, and not enjoying being around it or wearing it. It happened with my clothing wardrobe, and while that was frustrating, getting a new wardrobe wasn't such a big deal and could be done bit by bit, and without spending too much money. However, buying furniture and choosing fixtures that I don't like is much more costly and problematic to replace.

Michelle came with me and was able to give her professional input on its beauty as well as functionality, and the kitchen is really awesome.

The problem is that the kitchen that came with our apartment doesn't have enough cabinet space to store all my things, but because it is cherry color, we weren't able to find an exact match for it at Ikea. So we decided that instead of trying to match it, we'd pick another color as an accent, and went with a charcoal grey color, similar to the floor tiling
.

Our kitchen that came with the apartment had an L shaped lower cabinet, and then upper cabinets that went above one side of the L, from the fridge to the wall. Nothing on the other cabinet.

What we designed included grey cabinets from the backsplash to almost the ceiling, on the wall where there wasn't any upper cabinetry, leaving some space for the doors on the adjacent wall's cabinets to open. Additionally, we're getting wide and short cabinets, that open upward, to extend above the fridge and above the existing upper cabinets, all the way to the wall. The wall is 2.7 meters wide, and we want to maximize the space, so figured out how we can get the narrow cabinets to be 2.6 meters wide- either one wide one like in this Ikea display, 1.4 meters wide, with 60 centimeter wide ones on either side, or one 80 centimeter width (approximately the width of our fridge) above the fridge and then three 60 centimeter ones continuing to the wall.

The biggest issue with the kitchen really was there were too many colors- the floor is grey, the cherry cabinets, the eggshell counter tops, and then a yellowish cream backsplash. I chose the backsplash when I was quite sick (and didn't realize it at the time) so it ended up being a really bad choice, and I'm probably going to either rip out the backsplash that came with the kitchen and replace it with extra floor tiles, or cover the backsplash with some backsplash stickers... But either way, we specifically decided to not take into account those colors when designing the kitchen.

We also designed a really cool and space efficient kitchen for our rental unit as well!

Beyond that, we scouted out bedding options, chairs, couches, tables, and shelving units for other rooms in the house, as well as picking a rug that we want for my bedroom. We didn't buy any of those, just measured, recorded prices and photographed things.

But I did buy a few cushions since they were so cheap (between $2.50 and $5 each), were exactly my color scheme, and were machine washable. Unfortunately my cushions that I sewed for my current living room were not washable and got ruined, so these will be a great replacement!

Anyhow, so excited! Till next time!

-Penny