November 1, 2009

For the design phase of this project, I wanted to be very thorough.  Very.  Thorough.

And now it's time to share another life lesson from Dad.  More times then not, you should stare at things.  No, really.  Just stare and think.  To the uninitiated (our wives) it appears as though nothing is happening.  Clearly, if a tool belt is not on and dust isn't being made, we must be not making progress.  Au contraire!  Until you interrupted me, darling, I was half way done tearing out that cabinet in my mind.

After staring at the kitchen for countless hours, it was design phase time.  First stop?  The intertubes!  I needed a free, low-learning-curve piece of software to design the kitchen with.  There's some great home-design software products out there that you can buy that will do an awesome job.  TTFWEB over at 10K Kitchen has some nice software that I've been eyeing up, but I'm not prepared to spend yet.  So, I found the Kitchen Planning Tool by Ikea.  The good?  It's free, it's very intuitive and usable, and all of Ikea's cabinets follow the same sizing as the rest of the cabinet manufacters do.  The bad: Ikea may not have the variety in cabinetry you are looking for.  But for where I was, it's perfect.  I build the layout with the Ikea software and then sent it to some other cabinet manufacturers we are considering.  All Wood Fast through Costco has a free design service.  Using my schematics and the room measurements, they came back with these.
My wife really likes the idea of big corner cabinets.  They look really good now that I've seen them in the design. 

The Farmer's Sink is something that we feel is pretty central to the rustic theme we are going for here.  The cabinet under it will be a pain, though, as the cabinet manufacturer doesn't make one.  That's an upper cabinet placed underneath.
 


I'm not totally sold on the "Appliance Garage" cabinet, but I like the basic idea of hiding away small appliances.






The flooring isn't accurate, as we'll be going with ceramic.  Although I love hardwood flooring, the rest of the house will eventually be hardwood, so we'll do ceramic here to offer a little variety.
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