My Kitchen Re-Do: A Preview

Well, after a lot of foot-dragging and hand-wringing (on my part, not The Hubby's), we've plunged ahead on the kitchen re-do.

We've bought the gas stovetop, downdraft, and blower. I opted for a five-burner stove (currently I have six) because five is just enough. This puppy puts out enough BTUs to sear a rump roast, and yet it can also melt a pan of chocolate over a direct (very low) flame without scorching. I am so excited to be getting a gas stovetop after hassling with an electric one for 17 years, I could almost dance on the roof! Anyhow, here's what our new stove will look like (right now it looks like a huge cardboard box in the storage shed):

We've got the trash compactor (not worth the visuals; nothing sexy about a trash compactor). We also have our wine cooler. This isn't a great photo, but the cooler will be great. It'll hold a lot of wine, and it makes The Hubby happy. That's good enough for me!:
We've got the sink and faucet (also in boxes in the storage shed).

This is our sink. It's big enough to wash my biggest, deepest pasta pot, or even a pug or two. It's two inches deeper than the sink I have now, and it's super-reinforced stainless steel. That's important, because I'm a hasty, slightly clumsy cook, and I don't want to be dropping pots in my sink and making all sorts of dings.

Gor-geous!

This is our faucet. The Hubby is left-handed and I am right-handed, so he wanted something equally accessible by lefties and righties. I wanted to be sure my biggest pot fit under the faucet. (It does, with room to spare!) Best of all, it has a retractable sprayer, so I can pull out the nozzle and rinse big ol' pots (and the occasional pug tummy).

The faucet in this photo is brushed nickel, and we're ordering it in shiny stainless, but at least it gives you an idea of what it will look like:


We've picked out the paint color for the cabinets--a creamy white. We've picked a different paint color entirely for the island. The island will be Dunn-Edwards' "Sapphire Fog." Here's what it looks like online:

Complementary Colors Sapphire Fog (DE 5899)

Chip #323 Color Family (Green Blues, Blues)

Yeahhh, except that it doesn't look like that.

My cabinet dude painted up a sample board with Sapphire Fog on it, and it's darker, more purple-y/grey, and altogether more sophisticated than the online sample indicates.

I took my painted board outside and tried to capture a better image. This is what I got:

That's a little closer. It's a tricky color: in different lights, it looks baby blue (yuck!), lavendar (umm...), smoky blue-grey (yeah, baby), and French Blue (also okay by me). Luckily, where it is going, on the vertical surfaces of the island in the middle of the kitchen, it looks more smokeybluegreyFrenchBluewithundertonesoflavendar.

Got that?

Here's how the color looks next to a sample of our granite (going on all our countertops) and the tile for the backsplashes:

The tile is a lovely creamy-white, not dead white-white. The kitchen cabinets will be painted the same shade as the tile. The granite, which is called "Blue Pearl," is a fairly popular stone. Here's a closeup of what it looks like:

It's yummy and shifty-colored, too. In certain lights, it looks charcoal gray. In other lights, it looks blacker. It always has glints of shiny bits in it, but sometimes the bits look white, and sometimes they look bluer.

I guess I like those indiscriminate, hard-to-pin-down kinds of colors.

They seem more interesting, more sophisticated, somehow.

So, the granite is waiting at the fabricator's shop, where it will stay until the island is installed and our mid-1980s tile countertops are demolished and carted away.

I still have to pick up a small order of tile for the backsplashes, but the tile company has it in stock and it should be no trouble to swing by and get it soon.

We've worked out all the little wrinkles with the contractor, and we're ready to go.

This will be the fourth major renovation we've done to this house. One thing I've learned along the way is that, if you want to avoid an updated part of your house from screaming "Renovation!" and/or "I was done in the mid-2010s!," there is a simple trick:

Repeat elements that you already have elsewhere in the house. I repeat: REPEAT ELEMENTS FROM ELSEWHERE IN YOUR HOUSE. You'll avoid the patchworky, clearly renovated look every time.

For instance, in our house, the flooring in the kitchen (we're not changing it) is the same as the flooring in the family room and our master bedroom.

Also, the granite counters in our renovated master bath and kitchen are very similar to the one in the dining room, which predates our owning the house. They are all variations of dark grey/black stone with brilliant flecks of shiny bits in them.

Here is a chunk of Blue Pearl (destined for the kitchen), resting on our bathroom granite (called Volga Blue):

Very similar, right? And here is the same Blue Pearl chunk atop our dining room granite. I don't know the name of it, sorry. It was installed by the former owner in the mid-1980s:


Also, we use the same creamy white paint color for all the trim, everywhere else in the house. Doors, doorjambs, crown molding, wainscoting, and baseboards: it's all alike. This same creamy white paint will be on all our kitchen cabinets (except the island).

In addition, the cabinet guy tried to seduce me with choosing a brushstroke-free paint treatment for the kitchen cabinets and island. He sprays on the paint for a mirror-smooth finish. It is, admittedly, gorgeous; it looks like the paint job on a luxury car! But in the end, we opted for the less sexy, painted-with-a-brush look. Because that's what all the painted surfaces in the rest of the house look like. Our home was built in the 1930s; nobody had mirror-smooth painted anything back then.

And lastly, the paint color for the kitchen island is almost exactly the same color as our front door, just a shade lighter. See?:

All of this, I hope, will add up to a kitchen that looks like it's always been part of the house.

And now, let the wild rumpus begin! Demolition starts in 3, 2, 1...