Cabinets, countertops and floors, oh my!

    My last post about the kitchen was in March, which feels like way more than two months ago. During my writing break, we took a family Spring Break to Savannah; I started teaching fifth grade grammar and writing at the kids’ school; and I even picked up third grade math for the last few weeks before summer break! It was kind of a whirlwind. I am so glad I picked up the grammar and writing class because it was Rye’s class and I get a kick out of his cohort, but all the prep and grading was very challenging. Hats off to people who teach five days a week and still manage to get everything else done! I taught two days a week and it was kicking my butt. My family would have to turn to foraging for food if I worked full time. All this kitchen remodel would be in vain. Speaking of kitchen remodel...
I have spent a lot of space writing about the function of the kitchen, because that absolutely needs to come first when planning a remodel. But now I can tell you about the form, and the three big details: cabinets, countertops and flooring!
It’s the least exciting, but I knew we had to choose our flooring first because it's the foundation and will be visible in every room. It must be able to both stand on its own (as a likeable floor) and play well with the cabinets. Our house has half wood floors and half carpet on the first floor. The carpet came with some nasty stains so it had to go anyway, and while I would have liked to just match the existing wood floors, it turns out they have already been sanded and restained once, so if we put new floor boards down beside it, we would have to sand them down as if it was on its second refinishing as well, which ends up being a big mess and a lot of time and cost we were counseled just to start fresh. 
   At the old house we had original heart pine floors stained in red chestnut, which was a nice reddish brown color…that we did not want to repeat. After all, if this house is going to be our “comfortable retreat” we want it to feel light and airy, including the floors. If Josh had his way, he would choose a pickled white wood floor (he’s a big fan of Architectural Digest and there’s a lot of that in those circles) but I feel like that look is too sterile (and all dirt would show). I could agree to light colored, but still tan. I even liked some of the rich medium-brown wood floors, but Josh vetoed that, and I ended up deciding that didn’t fit my design keywords anyway. 
  We were interested in both solid hardwoods and engineered hardwoods because we had installed engineered in the basement at the old house and were pretty happy with it. I visited the local hardwood flooring shop in town every now and then, trying to narrow down what I was looking for, but nothing felt right. The big box stores ended up being pretty terrible for research. They would have a full aisle or more for vinyl that looks like wood, and then four to eight samples of actual wood flooring. I would even stop at big box stores in more populated areas like Cockeysville and King of Prussia in hopes that they would have a larger assortment in stock, but they didn’t. This meant we had to resort to ordering 5-by-7-inch samples for $5 a piece online, then picking favorites and ordering full-sized boxes of them so you could see the variety of tones within a box to decide if you really did like it.

I'm pretty sure we had more, but we
might have gotten rid of some that I
ruled out right away. 

We ended up ordering 6 full-size boxes of floors (first four at one time and then two more later), and would lay the boards around the dining room and our bedroom to see if they grew on us. It was pretty discouraging, because of the 20 or so samples we collected, only two of them really looked like their internet picture. The boxes did end up looking like the samples, but there was no unboxing that led to a celebratory “I’ve found the one!” moment. 

   But, with patience, we found one that we kind of liked, and opened the whole box and spread it out in our bedroom (because of the great natural light in there), and over time decided “I still kind of like this one.” Neither of us got what we wanted individually, but it definitely scored the greatest combined ranking from the two of us (sorry kids, your votes meant nothing to us) and it was a very reasonable price to boot. Plus, once I started thinking about the countertops and lighting, I realized you don’t want the floor to be the jaw-dropper. The floor should be background – save the starry eyes for the more-at-eye-level details! 
   Before we committed to the floor, we were bringing home samples of kitchen cabinets to compare against our floor. I had originally thought I wanted a rich brown cabinet, medium dark but you could still see the wood grain through, so we brought home door samples in chocolate cherry, chocolate maple, and cognac maple.

This hutch is going in the future kitchen, and
was taken into consideration when choosing a stain.

We were allowed to keep these samples for 6 months because “nobody really chooses brown wood cabinets anymore.” I am not one to be swayed by trends for the sake of trends, but it was still not a nice thing to hear. So I kept the doors laying by the wood floor samples and kept thinking about it. And then I realized these too would not be “light and airy.” So I looked at the Kraftmaid website again and this time noticed “wicker,” which is a new stain that debuted last year and that our cabinet company hadn’t had in their sample display. I emailed Emily, our kitchen designer/orderer, to ask about it, and she confirmed they did not have a sample yet but she would order it for me right away. A few weeks later, I picked up the wicker maple drawer front and wicker cherry drawer front and immediately loved them both. Sorry, brown wood tones, you were out. But then I still couldn’t choose which one of the wickers to choose. 

Wicker maple on the left, wicker cherry on the right.
Our chosen floor below!

   My gut said the wicker maple was too yellow. Josh said the wicker cherry was too pink, and that LED lights would make them look even pinker. We both could see each other’s point. Josh conceded I could pick the one I wanted, and I waffled back and forth a few times.* Some people we showed the samples to thought they were too close to the floor color, but I find that very peaceful. And again, it is going to let the countertop (and maybe tile backsplash) be the focal point. We took both samples with us when we went granite shopping so we could hold them both up to the slabs. 

  Granite is by far the most exciting part of the kitchen process! Well, it is if you like exciting kinds of granite. We LOVED the granite in our old kitchen, but we didn’t want to pick the same thing again. Our cabinet store is also a countertop fabricator, and we had looked at their samples during our first meeting with Emily. We found two that we liked:

Viscont White Extra Dark reminded us
of our beloved George Street's granite.

Blue Dune had a lot of movement, but this
slab was much more sand-colored while most
of them online had actual blue in them.

  However, much like the flooring choices, these particular slabs did not lead to a “Say Yes to the Dress” joyous moment like I was looking for. So we went to visit the granite suppliers they work with to see if we could find The One. We started with Bramati in Frederick (as my birthday daytrip!) because that’s where we found the George Street granite and we had had a good experience with them our last time around. The staff there is very friendly, and while they aren’t allowed to talk price with you if you are using a separate fabricator, the elderly gentleman manager assured me that the things I liked were average to below average in cost. We kind of did go gaga over this slab of stone:

In my fantasy, Fantasy Brown would not be
so susceptible to chipping and stains. 

only to be heart broken when we learned it is Fantasy Brown, which is kind of a muddy term for a stone that is between granite and marble. We loved this one because the brown striations reminded us of a weathered old tree, and the white parts were a really nice shade of creamy white that was not yellowy. I did a ton of research and people reported more good experiences than bad experiences with their Fantasy Brown cabinets, but many of them recommended getting it in leather texture rather than polished, that way when chips or etching happened it would be less noticeable. We really prefer the polished look, and I know that if the counters got chipped around the sink (where I wash my big cast iron skillet and ridiculously heavy pizza steel), it would bother me. We sighed and moved on. 
   I did more specific scoping of the other suppliers’ websites and saved photos and wrote down names of specific varieties we wanted to see in person. However, when we visited our second location, Gramaco in Laurel, it turned out that the one we fell in love with was one I hadn’t even noticed on the website. We had the workers bring the forklift over to see some Blue Dune, which we weren’t very taken with, but then Josh asked to see the Monte Cristo that was behind it:

Behold, Monte Cristo!

In the movie version of this kitchen remodel, the warehouse ceiling would split open, a light would shine down from heaven on this slab, angels would play their trumpets and I would have wept at the beauty of this slab. THIS was my “Say Yes to the Dress” moment! Pictures don’t quite capture it, but it is blue and gray and creamy and what looks like big brown spots are actually GOLD patches. It has a lot of “movement,” which is what they call it when the pattern is not very uniform, and it has mountain peaks and ocean waves and it is a giant piece of nature mined for my domestic enjoyment. I was ready to sign on the spot, but the company told us they were getting some more slabs from the same lot delivered in a week or two, and Josh wanted to see those before we committed to this one. Gramaco gives you a week to place a hold on the stone before you have to get it under contract, but they extended it an extra week for us so we could come back to see the new slabs. Seeing the other slabs, we actually did really like one of them, but it had a little ripple of uneveness to the surface, which may have been nothing, but that I feared could have been a potential future crack or fracture. Josh agreed, so we went back over our original piece again, measuring it, searching for any other signs of cracks or chips, and only found one finger print-sized chip on the very edge that could easily be cut off. We got out our painters tape and started laying out which part we would want to be the island countertop, where the sink cutout would be, and which parts to use for the rest of the counters, and even measured it for radiation with a homemade Geiger counter that we borrowed from my friend Dylan. I think our sales rep Isabelle thought we were super cute and/or super neurotic, and she took a picture of us, added some words to it, and PRINTED IT OUT FOR US then and there as a souvenir of our day. She contacted the cabinet company and the papers were drawn up for the contract the next day. 

As Josh said, "When you bring your own
Geiger counter, they know you're special!"

  So, after loosely holding the three big elements in balance as we made sure they all would (should?) look good together, we now are under contract on the countertops, have ordered our cabinets in wicker maple (they should take 4-5 weeks) and are waiting for our flooring choice to come back in stock so we can order that in the next few weeks, and if it doesn’t come in stock, it is available in another width that we can go with and still get the same look. 
   My plans for the renovation start were originally pinned on early April, were pushed back to late April, and eventually postponed to the first week of June, but it all feels like it’s coming together as it should be. A week ago I started packing up the office furniture that lives in our dining room and living room, now that the school year has come to a close, and I’ve even gone through the kitchen drawers of non-essentials and packed things like wooden skewers, plastic utensils brought home from Chick-Fil-A, cloth napkins, etc. I sold my antique table that served as my desk because we won’t have room for it during the remodel, nor a good place for it post-remodel. There’s still SO MUCH to do before demo starts, but chipping away at a box or two a day is pretty much the way to do it. There’s no use getting the move to the basement done early if the steps that will follow it aren’t going to be ready! Friends are lined up to help us move furniture June 2, and Lord willing, the crowbar and sledgehammer will come out on June 3! 

*A footnote on indecision: I sat on choosing between these two cabinets for over a month. I'm a pretty decisive person, but I could not make up my mind. My friends kept telling me "whatever you choose is going to be great," but in the back of my mind, I had the Eminem song "Lose Yourself" playing the background, because the opportunity to design your own kitchen usually DOES come "once in a lifetime," and here I was blessed enough to be doing it for a second (and probably last) time! The stain color is so new that Kraftmaid doesn't even have any pictures of kitchens designed in it with maple or cherry, only oak, and I'm not a fan of the grain of oak on cabinets. I found one woman on Houzz who said she had ordered wicker maple for her spring kitchen remodel, and I reached out to her through Houzz and possibly Instagram (not sure they were the same Britt V) to ask for follow up on how she liked it, but she never got back to me. So I had to make the decision based on a 12-by-8-inch drawer front sample. Really hoping I love it, and if not, that I quickly learn to love it!