Kitchen Selections

We worked with a "kitchen designer" at Home Depot Expo. This wasn't a very good experience (I'll just call her "C"), but here are the cabinet designs she came up with:A lot of people had a hard time envisioning what we wanted to do between the kitchen and dining room where the closet used to be and where the stairs go to the basement, including C, but she did end up coming up with a good solution, and the upper corner cabinet was her idea.

Since we picked out a granite counter top we were able to get an undermount sink - very cool.

We had a really hard time deciding between these three light fixtures for over the booth. We ended up choosing the one on the far left from Pottery Barn.

We also had a really hard time choosing tile for the backsplash, but I'm so glad we took our time with this decision. We ended up choosing a simple square bisque tile for the majority of the backsplash and this border tile:
We knew we definitely wanted hardwood floors in the kitchen, but choosing the exact flooring was a little tricky. This is the original wood flooring that we have in the rest of the downstairs:
We ended up choosing this pre-finished cherry flooring from Home Depot Expo that's a pretty close match. And if we ever end up replacing the rest of the flooring downstairs, we'll use this.
I was so happy to replace another one of those huge, ugly heating registers, this time with a flush mount grille from Reggio Registers. It came unfinished so we were able to stain it to match the new floor perfectly.

Kitchen - Before Pictures

This is pretty much how the kitchen looked when we bought our house in 2000 except the walls were originally a weird peachy color. Again, I'm embarrassed to say that I picked out this wallpaper, but at the time it seemed like the best way to compliment the awful cabinet color. The only other option was to paint the cabinets. In hindsight that's probably what we should have done, but you live and you learn.

So when you walk into the kitchen, this is what you see to the right:
Straight ahead:
Another idea we had when we first moved in was to open up the closet on the left (which is where the stairs go to the basement) so you could see into the dining room. When we had the dumpster here for the downstairs bathroom remodel, we had them go ahead and open up the walls and patch up the drywall. So it looked like this for quite a while. We called it "the throne".This is the view looking back into the living room. Another idea we thought about over the years was removing this closet so we could have an eat-in kitchen.
So we also had the bathroom guys remove the closet walls. Unfortunately that left the tile torn up, so we couldn't even put a table and chairs here while we were waiting to remodel the kitchen.