Friday, January 7

What a Girl Wants

What every girl wants is a great kitchen. A room that is both beautiful and functional. A place for friends to gather and memories to be made. Unfortunately not all of us are lucky enough to have such a kitchen, or the loads of money required to buy new cabinets & countertops to make such a dream come true. Such is the case in our house. That's why I am on a mission to do the best I can with what this house has given me and create a DIY kitchen masterpiece spending as little money as possible! This is a project that will no doubt take time and planning, and one that we probably won't even begin to tackle for quite sometime (think summer when it's warm enough to open the windows while we paint). Nonetheless, my wheels are turning and planning has begun!

Here is our kitchen the day we closed:
All the storage is what you see, and we knew going in that it wouldn't be enough! And that is all the countertop space we have. It's tight. Since this photo, we took out the wall between the kitchen in living room (you can see it peeking in on the the left) to open up all the main living areas of our home. It was one of the first things we did on closing day, thanks to the help of my parents and grandparents. They are the best!

Here is our kitchen as it stands now:

I'm kind of embarrassed. It is such a mess. So just focus on how much better it will look when I have good places to put everything away! :)  It is already improved by the removal of the wall and feels so open! It's great! You can see we've added mismatched storage all along the right wall, just trying to make enough room to keep everything. (sorry for the bad picture, I should have done it in the morning for more daylight!)

It needs a LOT of help. Obviously. Remember the two things I mentioned before? Beauty and function? Well this kitchen has neither. So on to the plan!

Here are some rough plans of what we will be shooting for. This is the general feel I want for the kitchen:
Bright and airy and warm. White cabinets with light walls and a darker countertop. And I definitely like the idea of bamboo shades instead of curtains. Since we'll be mostly working with what we have, I plan to get the finishes I want on the existing cabinets by following this tutorial. It should look something like this table:
The final part of the plan today is to remove the mismatched storage along the right wall and replace it with one cohesive piece, probably somethings like this:

And that's all I've worked out so far. We're hoping to spend no more than a few hundred dollars on this whole project. (Which would be waaaaay better than the thousands it would cost to start from scratch!) And although we won't be starting for awhile, I just wanted to get my ideas down, kind of like a design notebook, so I can keep track of my favorite ideas and any links/tutorials I'll need to find later. I hope you've enjoyed daydreaming with me today! :)

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