Well, we're moving once again. After seven years away from family, my husband landed a great job back home in North Carolina. We have loved living in Alabama, but with the kids growing up and another on the way, it's nice to be home. We are about to close on a house and I'm currently finalizing paint colors and kitchen planning.
We are trying to plan the perfect kitchen on a budget, working around the existing tan tile flooring. Our plans are to raise the upper cabinets to the ceiling, paint them white, and add a shelf underneath. We will also be painting the lower cabinets a warm gray, adding a tile backsplash, modifying the cabinetry around the fridge, and putting in new granite countertops. Hopefully this will all (or mostly) be happening in the next three weeks or so, before we move in. That's a pretty small time frame for us since we normally live in our projects and take our time. We'll see how it goes :-)
I was searching around for the perfect inspiration kitchen and found an amazing one at
Our Vintage Home Love:
Hello, gorgeous kitchen! I absolutely love the warmth they brought to this kitchen by adding the rustic wood shelving and bamboo shades. I also love that they don't have a farmhouse sink, which we would absolutely love, but isn't in the budget this time around. This photo gave me the confidence that we can still get an awesome cottage kitchen look without having to have the farmhouse sink. Again, I cannot express how much I love this kitchen and what a great job they did.
Our first big decision is what kind of granite we want. Here are my badly photoshopped images to give us an idea of what each would look like. Our top two choices are honed black with the lower cabinet similar to our inspiration kitchen, or cotton white with darker lower cabinets.
I didn't feel that the rustic wood shelf looked as good with the white granite so I added a white floating shelf instead.
Though I absolutely loved the look of the white granite in the store, I think I like the more casual charm of the black granite. I definitely wanted to do either darker gray lower cabinets or a dark countertop to add some contrast with the light tile floors and I think the darker countertop gives me the look I want.
Any opinions?
