Hi Y’all!

What better place to start my home tour posts than the kitchen, it is definitely the heart of our home and my very favorite room in our house.  In fact, this kitchen is one of the major reasons why we built this model. We did throw quite a bit of extra money into the kitchen, we upgraded the cabinets, the countertops, the faucet, the appliances, the hood was extra, and we added more recessed lighting (because it has a cathedral ceiling in there and the lighting provided from the builder was not gonna cut it).  The hardwood floors were also an upgrade.

Let’s go through our chosen materials and finishes:

The cabinets are KraftMaid, the uppers are 42″ high, and the color is called “Autumn Blush”.  The cabinet doors and drawers are all “full coverage” meaning it would be next to impossible to open them if they didn’t have handles on them. All of the doors and drawers are “soft close”, there is no way one can slam anything shut. 😉  All you need to do is push and the doors and drawers gently close softly.

We chose to put a large crown molding around the tops of the cabinets, and a piece of molding around the bottom called a light rail. Those two pieces of molding really make those cabinets pop!

Here is the under cabinet lighting, I’m thinking that eventually we will change it out for more ambient lighting. But, it is fine for now, in fact, the flouresent lights aren’t as harsh as I thought they might be.

My hubby is quite handy and is a pretty savvy online shopper; he saved us a ton of money with those door pulls.  The cabinet company was going to charge us $25 a piece installed, yes, I said *a piece* for each one of those door pulls. Complete highway robbery in my humble opinion! Yes, they are quite pretty and nice and heavy and they were including the labor for installation in that cost, but $25 a piece? Ridiculous!  My hubby found them online for $7 a piece and purchased enough of them for every door and drawer. Now, I’ve seen in other homes where folks choose a knob for uppers and a pull for lowers, or vice versa.  We chose these pulls for all doors and drawers and I love how they look.   AND **bonus** we didn’t have to pay an installation fee, my hubby made jigs and drilled the holes and installed every single door and drawer pull, 60 in all–better him than me…goodness knows I would not trust myself to drill holes in those pretty cabinets!

One spiffy upgrade that we chose was a trashcan cabinet.  In our other home, I used to keep a trashcan under the sink, I’m not one who enjoys seeing a trashcan sitting out on the floor, so even though we had a small kitchen in our previous home, part of the under the sink space was utilized for a trashcan. So this is a real luxury for me.

Now for the counter top and backsplash choices, to say we struggled with these choices is an understatement.  I wanted to keep the kitchen’s color pallet in a more classic hue.  Adding splashes of color via paint and decor is always a better option in my opinion. So we chose earth tones.  The counter top’s granite is called “Santa Cecelia Gold” and the backsplash is a travertine tile in beige tones. I feel that these colors paired beautifully with one another and also contrasted nicely with the hardwood and cabinet colors. I was glad these choices were finally made; I cannot tell you how many sleepless nights I had while making these decisions. I know how expensive it is to redecorate a kitchen and I didn’t want to have to do that…well, really…ever, so these choices were some of the most important that we made. 🙂

The island! I love the island! It has a pretty curved bump-out on one side where three chairs sit utilized by many people as they keep us company while we cook or while I craft. 🙂  It has tons of storage space underneath of it as well. It is 8′ long and 4′ wide at the widest point.  We use this island for tons of things, but, mostly, it is my creative hub. 🙂  I make all of my crafts on this island..of course many other uses are just as important, like setting dinner out, or setting up a buffet for larger gatherings.  It is awesome and I cannot say enough good things about it. 🙂

The triple windows along the back wall are another one of my favorite features, I did an entire blog post here showing you how I change the window decor out as the Seasons change.

There is also a walk-in pantry that holds anything and everything including our wireless router and printer.

I composed a Blog post that describes how I came up with the decor that is arranged on top of the cabinets. Here is a link to that post.

I cannot express to y’all enough how much I adore our kitchen, and again, I feel so humbly blessed that we are able to enjoy it from now on, this is definitely the last house we will ever have and we waited for a long time to build exactly what our vision was for our retirement years. 🙂

Until the next time, y’all take good care! ❤

**In crafting there are no mistakes just unique creations**