After replacing the engineered wood with beautiful white oak flooring and painting the whole house with a fresh coat of paint (Swiss Coffee by Behr), we got to work on the kitchen right away. Well, kind of. We actually finished the basement first and added a full bath down there. But that’s for another post…
The first thing I did was to start working on my designs. I knew that I wanted to keep a neutral color palette for the whole house, to really highlight the beautiful green from the nature outside. I decided to go with classic black and white with brass hardware to make everything look updated, sleek, and modern.
Rather than replacing the cabinets entirely, we decided to just switch the doors. This saved us a bunch of money and was actually not too difficult. The layout of the kitchen worked well for the space so we didn’t need to do any changes on that front.
I toyed with the idea of open shelving because I absolutely love the look of it, but as you can see from the video, the kitchen isn’t huge and removing the upper cabinets would have cut down the storage by quite a lot. Plus, John vetoed that idea pretty much right away because he has a lot of tools and supplies that he uses while cooking. Someday, in some other house, I will have my beautiful open shelves in the kitchen (I hope)!
We used a different vendor for the island counter, because I wanted to use a contrasting color/stone. Picking out countertops is super fun. We went to Newburgh Stone Surfaces and spent a long time looking at various samples before deciding to go with the more budget friendly option of getting a slab that was already on hand. We wound up going with a white marbled quartz that really popped against the black of the bottom cabinets.
We also added in a giant farm sink which I am obsessed with and a new faucet from California Faucets. We had originally put in a faucet from Signature Hardware but it broke within a month so we replaced it with the California Faucet one which was much higher quality (and more expensive of course).
Speaking of the island, I knew I wanted to do something cool and custom in the kitchen somewhere and decided that fluting on the island would be it. Eye Swoon has a fluted island in her Hamptons home that I was obsessed with and so I figured we could get whatever she used for our island.
Long story short, rather than just ordering something to wrap the island in, we picked up a bunch of these wooden dowels from Home Depot, cut them in half, and nailed them to the existing island. It turned out perfect and was a super simple and cheap project that pretty much anyone can do! I think it adds a nice custom element to the kitchen as well.
We removed the mounted microwave to add a hood for the new Bertazzoni range that we got, and also upgraded the refrigerator. I really like having a bottom freezer because it adds a lot more room and makes it much easier to keep things organized.
We put two pendant lights that I got on sale from Menu Space above the island to anchor the space a bit more. They’re actually “smart” lights that come with an app for adjusting the warmth of the color and dimming, which is really cool. They even have a night mode that puts them at a low setting so that I don’t have to fumble in the dark if I need to get a glass of water or midnight snack. They’re controlled by wall switches too so they still work without the app.
Finally, we redid the backsplash with Zellige Moroccan tile from Clé Tile in Sea Salt (4″x4″ squares). I’m obsessed with the variation in color and texture that it gives and love how the light reflects off of it throughout the day.
All in all, the kitchen took a bit because of various delays in shipping and also because our original contractor kind of ghosted us in the middle of everything. I think we wound up spending about 5-6 months on various aspects but really it could have all been done in 1-2 months if we had everything on hand and ready to go. That’s the reality of renovating during COVID though!
John is thrilled with his new kitchen and so am I! We’ve had lots of dinner parties and somehow we always wind up standing around the kitchen island, eating, drinking, and laughing with our friends.
Here’s the final results:
