(Did you sing the title of this post to the Charlie Brown tune of Christmas?  If you did, we’re best friends.)

Remember when Aaron was at work one day and I started kitchen demo by myself?

Right.  Like I was saying… We knocked out a few walls, closets, and pantries (oh my!).  Next came getting all kinds of bids and quotes.

Except, I wasn’t very happy with them.  SEVERAL different companies came and went telling me all kinds of different things.  But none of it was doing it for me.  Like pumpkin pie.  Ew.

After doing some research, Aaron and I were leaning towards an IKEA kitchen.  They get great reviews, and you really can’t beat the cost.  We were getting quoted between $20,000-$30,000 for our kitchen to be finished.  Not cool Robert Frost.  We can do a custom kitchen with IKEA for $10,000 (including the cost of brand new appliances).  That’s a number that I can accept.  In fact, it’s welcomed. It’s less than what we had budgeted for our complete kitchen re-do.

We’ve been working with the yellow referees IKEA professionals on putting together our kitchen design.  And without further ado- might I remind you what we live in:

(The 3D rendering wouldn’t let us add a hallway, so there’s a door.  But just remember, IRL: HALL WAY!)

So the plan for the west wall of the dining room is this:
There is 5 feet of counter top which will be used as a buffet.  Cabinets above and below will make it feel like a built in hutch.  The closet to the left of the buffet is for vacuum and broom storage.  The closet to the right is pantry, equipped with slide-out shelves.

There will be 80″ of added counter space to the right of the range.  There are shallow cabinets under for storage.  So much storage to hide all my things.  STORE ALL THE THINGS!  The 3D rendering couldn’t generate the full counter top, but IRL, it will come all the way out so it can be used as a bar.

Like this picture I drew, lolz.

The rendering didn’t show the little touches, so I’ll show you what we’ve got so far.

The door fronts we are going with are the LIDINGO.  The Lidingo ate your baby!  Hardware: TYDA.  We’ll be doing a grey subway tile backsplash similar to this one.

The counter tops are a dark grey quartz.  It’ll look pretty rad, I do believe.

I don’t know how long we’ll be in our house, so I didn’t want to get too crazy with the finishes.  I want to be able to sell it easily when the time comes.

The install guys will be coming on July 10th for the final last check.  The install will happen before July is over.

And there you have it.  Our future kitchen.  I will be SO tickled to have a pantry again.  Ain’t nobody got time to walk downstairs to the food storage room.  I’ll also be really excited to have a built-in buffet (and extra bar counters) so we don’t have to lose our table every time we have a party.

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