Our New Kitchen

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September 2, 2016 by Sarah

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Welcome to our kitchen! We’ve been back in our home for about 8 months now, and the kitchen is hands down my favorite part of the remodel. We spend a lot of time in this space; cooking, eating, hanging out, and hosting. Pat and I knew that we wanted the kitchen to be a central part of our home, and we were very excited about how it turned out. I thought I’d post some photos and share some of the thought behind how we planned it.

First, if you hadn’t seen it, here is what our kitchen was before.

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I loved this little kitchen. When we first bought our house, it was just so cool that it was ours. It was galley style, and it was definitely small, but it worked for us. When we first moved in, I was pregnant with Gianna our first, and this kitchen served us very well up through the second trimester with Eliza, our third! Lots of memories in this space. 

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As part of our remodel, we opened up the wall behind the original kitchen sink and pushed out to add a family room. (A little aside, in the photo I think I had given birth 3-4 weeks before. I did a huge bulk of the kitchen planning in my third trimester and then had Eliza and was post-partuming it up in the months where things were really taking shape. I was SO ready and wanting to get back in our house.)

A huge inspiration for our kitchen layout and design was one of my favorite HGTV shows, Fixer Upper. I absolutely love it. This kitchen and also this one that Joanna designed in particular were what I drew a lot of ideas from. In the first link, Pat and I just loved the idea of a huge island for our friends and family to gather around. The second kitchen made me fall in love with the contrast of natural wood and white/gray. I would say the name of the look we went for was “modern farmhouse.” I created a small Pinterest board for it here.

When the time came for us to design the layout of our kitchen, we planted a large 6 foot by 6 foot island right in the middle of it. And it really has become such a central part of our home. We decided on butcher block because we love the look and it’s inexpensive compared to other countertop options. It does get scratched and it’s easy to make marks (which is also true for our carrera marble side counters), but we don’t mind that. For us, it’s a lived-in look that tells a story.

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To orient you a little more to the space, as you can see above, the family room is adjacent to the kitchen, and the dining room is on the other side. You can see the edge of it to the right in the photo below. The doorway leads to a hallway with bedrooms.

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When planning the kitchen and house in general, we thought about our current family but also our family 10+ years from now. Right now we have 3 little ones 4 and under, but fast forward into the future, we hope to have 4. And they will be teenagers someday! Teenagers who eat a lot. Thinking about that, I ended up doing a cooktop with 5 burners and also added a second oven to the kitchen. After doing a lot of research, I chose an induction cooktop for it’s energy efficiency and also safety for the kids who are often underfoot as I cook. We also did electric ovens because we plan to get solar panels in the future.

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One of the coolest features in our kitchen is the pot-filler. I had never even heard of such a thing before Pat’s CEO’s wife showed it to us in her kitchen. It’s so nice to have water access there to fill up pots with. And, I’ve since noticed that almost every Fixer Upper kitchen has one too.

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And, let me tell you about our drawers. I LOVE our drawers. Especially these ones below that are big and deep and wide and hold everything.

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These two are right under the cooktop, and it’s so nice having all my pots and pans easily accessible underneath. We splurged on getting custom cabinets, and for us, it was really worth it.

When setting up our kitchen, I designated a few of the smaller, lower drawers for the kid’s plates, utensils, and cups. It’s been so nice having the kids able to access their own things. They (mostly) love grabbing their plates and forks themselves for meals, which saves me a few minutes as I’m trying to finish up a meal. It gives them more responsibility and I think helps them feel like the kitchen is their space too.

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On the topic of drawers, another layout decision was to position all our plate/utensil/tupperware drawers in close proximity to our dishwasher. I got this idea from my uncle’s kitchen and then I was convinced by it from this blog post. Having lived with it these past few months, I’m really glad we did it. It’s so functional.

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Another part of the kitchen design that I knew I wanted was a window behind the kitchen sink. Pat and I both spend a lot of time washing dishes at the sink area, and I love being able to look outside. We went with a garden window and it’s currently holding all our orchids.

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We plan to add 2 or 3 floating shelves on each side of the window, wooden ones that match our butcher block island. Like this.

A few other looks at the kitchen.

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You can see below that the 2 ovens are across from each other. We also snuck in the microwave in the island, I wanted as much open counter space as possible.

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And lastly, what I think might be one of the smartest things about our kitchen is that we converted a closet for our water heater into a pantry. You can see the door to the pantry in the right-side of the bottom photo. The former water heater door used to be on the other side, in the hallway. We went with a tankless heater and moved it outside which freed up the closet! Having a pantry is awesome.

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I’d love to answer any other questions you might have about our kitchen including specific products and vendors. Just let me know.

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Did you make it to the end of this post?! Congrats, you deserve a home-cooked meal in our new kitchen.


1 comment »

  1. Damian says:

    Love it! I’ve been missing out on my daily dose of HGTV since dropping DIRECTV haha. That’s a nice kitchen.

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