Kitchen Plans: The Big Picture

When we bought our house we knew we would eventually remodel the kitchen. You’ve seen it. You know it was not exactly a selling point. But we saw potential in it and decided it would be worth the effort once we’d saved up enough funds.

Our original plan involved bumping out one of the exterior walls (the same one the fireplace is on) to add some square footage and open up the space. The more we talked about that idea, though, the more we realized how involved–and expensive–it was going to be. Altering the roof line, matching the new exterior to the old one, messing with the foundation…not to mention all the little things like repainting the trim on the entire house to match. It would be a ton of work, and much of it would require a professional contractor to make sure everything was up to code. We weren’t even sure we’d be able to live in our house during construction if we went that route.

I didn’t feel like it would be a worthwhile investment, and while David was still toying with the idea, he also knew it would take another year or more to save up for it. We decided to scrap the bigger kitchen dream and just work with what we had.

After doing a little research into cabinetry options–since that would likely be our biggest expense–we decided to do an Ikea kitchen. Ikea had all the features and the look we wanted at a price we could handle, and they don’t care if you want to install it yourself. All the other places I talked to included installation in their quote, which took it way out of our price range. We’re good DIYers; no sense in paying someone else for work we are able and willing to do ourselves.

Turns out Ikea offers an in-home design service for $200. If you purchase your kitchen within 30 days of having the design created, that fee goes toward the cost of the kitchen. Since we knew we would be buying, the service was essentially free, so we scheduled them to come take some measurements.

The woman who came was awesome. She was sweet to the girls and excited to help make our kitchen better and thrilled that my engineer husband had left her some detailed notes to work from. After a couple hours of work, she had a 3D model of our design, a floorplan, and a point-by-point breakdown on what to purchase and where everything would go.

So pretty!!!

You can see we moved the fridge to the other side of the room, where it will be surrounded by a floor-to-ceiling pantry. Not a huge pantry, but an improvement over the cavernous pantry-turned-garbage-hole we had before. The wall where the fridge was will have lots of deep drawer storage, including space for trash and recycle bins, and tons of prep space for baking yummy things. The single cabinet up there will be for spices and such. The plan is to add open shelving next to it above that work area, but it’s not included in this rendering since we’ll probably build those ourselves. We also got rid of the dropped ceiling which makes the space look so much better even in a 3D rendering!

I’ll share details such as our choices for counter tops and cabinets soon. In the meantime, what do you think of the plan so far?

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