Posted by We decided to save money by purchasing a fixer-upper. Our plan was to completely gut the kitchen and to create our own dream kitchen from scratch.
We had been living in small rentals for years and had been dreaming about getting our own place for a while. We had looked at so many magazines and pictures and thought we knew everything about interior decor. We thought creating our kitchen from scratch would be fun and easy.
Things went wrong. We love our home and are thankful for it. Our current home is a huge improvement compared to the different rentals we lived in prior to becoming homeowners. However, the kitchen looks nothing like what we had in mind when we purchased our fixer-upper. This is a little disappointing and I think everyone could learn from the mistakes we made.
What Does Our Kitchen look Like?
Our kitchen has some Thomasville cabinets that we found at Home Depot in a cream color. The faucet has a bronze finish, and so does the cabinet hardware. We have a quartz counter with a brown color and a slate backsplash. The kitchen is functional and there is nothing wrong with it. However, it does not look anything like what we wanted to design, which is really disappointing.
What Happened?
Pinterest wasn’t around back when we started designing our kitchen. We had looked at several home design magazines and had a pretty good idea of what we wanted. We had imagined a kitchen with dark floors and white cabinets. And we wanted Carrera marble. Lots of it.
We decided to shop for the cabinets first. We visited different stores, including big box stores, warehouses and smaller furniture stores. We found a place with a nice showroom and a designer approached us to help us with our project. We told her about the dark floors and white cabinets we wanted. She said that cream cabinets would work best. She thought that white cabinets would be too much of a contrast with the dark floor.
We trusted her because she was a professional designer. Her advice made sense to use and we decided to shop for cream cabinets instead. I realized later that she was wrong and that the contrast between the white cabinets and the dark floor was exactly what we wanted for our kitchen. I thought that she knew better because she worked as a professional designer. We ended up not getting what we wanted because we assumed that the professional we talked to knew better.
First Mistake: We should not have trusted someone else on how to design our kitchen. We already knew what we wanted and should have shopped for what we had in mind.
Second Mistake: We finally found some cream cabinets that we liked at Home Depot. If you have ever been to this type of store, you know that they have a huge selection of hardware. You can look at different colors, styles and finish and have them create the cabinets you want. We chose the pearl finish because it looked good under the fluorescent lights of the store and never actually seen it on the cabinet doors until the product was delivered.
This is not the right way to shop for cabinets! You need to take a sample home, look at it under a different light and see how it looks on the cabinet door that you want. Our cabinets were delivered six weeks later and we were really disappointed! The only thing in this process that we were pleased with was our DIY pull out shelving kits for Miracle Shelves. You can check them out here: Miracle Shelves – do it yourself shelves