Kitchen: Show & Tell

For those of you who read this blog (I know there are at least two of you out there), I am sorry I haven't posted anything in over a week! I've been really busy - we went to California over the weekend, celebrated my birthday (28!?!), and I've been helping to plan a big dinner at my church on Saturday. Despite all of this, I do have a lot of updates to show you all.

Let's start with ... the kitchen.

As you know, we ordered our kitchen cabinets last week. We are getting them through JC Group Inc. We were very pleased with their price and selection - and the fact that you can special order cabinets from them in the exact style, color, dimension, basically everything you can think of customizing, for just a little more than the in-stock cabinets. You do have to be patient and wait 6-8 weeks for them, but we were happy to wait! I'm getting the style and color I want so I'm very happy! Plus, they give you a computerized layout of what everything will look like.

Let the tour begin! (All images were created by JC Group Inc, besides my really awesome drawing - that's all me - and the last picture.)

Here is the birds eye view of what it will look like...pretty much. You can see the layout anyway.  There is going to be an archway on the left side where the peninsula is.  The arch will connect the window wall  to the wall that is above (in this picture anyway) the doorway into the kitchen. Too hard to explain. You'll just have to wait and see!

The doorway to the left is the pantry doorway. The raised island thing above the cook top will not be there; it will be more of a "pony wall" and above it will be the archway. The back side of the peninsula is going to be sheetrocked, so that if you are standing in our dining room and looking toward the kitchen, it will look like this (the gray is wall/sheetrock, the white is open!...don't laugh at my drawing):

I wanted our kitchen to feel like a separate room, but still feel open, and the Mr. wanted a more open feel, so I think this is a really good compromise.  (The peninsula wall - sheetrock - is going to be higher than the countertop of the peninsula so I can have some backsplash behind the cooktop.)

Here's a view looking at our pretty double wall oven and microwave.  I was just going to put the microwave on the counter...but, after some thinking, decided that it would sure be nice not to have it take up precious counter space, so we decided on a base microwave cabinet.

Here we are looking at the side of the kitchen that will have the archway wall. I wish our view out our kitchen window was a nice pasture rather than other house, but oh well!!

I can't wait to have my kitchen look similar to the pictures above instead of this:

Okay. It's not quite that bad anymore now that our bedroom is walled off, but close!  It will be so nice.  We still are undecided still on flooring, countertops and backsplash, and we need to get appliances (we're going with stainless steel), so we've got a lot of work to do before a finished kitchen becomes a reality. But we're getting closer!