Help me redesign my kitchen...

Okay, I'm looking for inspiration pictures to pin to my pinterest for when we start redoing our kitchen this next year. We moved in last November, and a yucky kitchen was a sacrifice we had to make to be able to afford a house in this area...but I was promised by Zach that if I forfeited vacation this coming year, we could redo it.

SO... here is my current kitchen (From the listing, with the seller's furniture and such)





It's so WHITE. My dream kitchen has dark cherry cabinets, but the cabinets we have are actually in really good shape, and have awesome built in sliding drawers and such. So, I think we'll keep those to save money. Obviously we'll replace the awful white doors with matching honey colored wood.

What I'm looking for is pictures of kitchens with light colored cabinets. I have such trouble visualizing different flooring and counters, and I want help finding pictures that I can show to contractors to show them what I like. Any pinterest lovers want to help me sift through stuff?

I love the white doors, but I LOVE black and white kitchens. Do a google image search for black and white kitchen. I think it would look awesome if you just painted the wood grain part of your counters/cabinets black and left the rest white. It would have such a clean, crisp look. I generally hate exposed wood for the most part, though.

Sorry, I know that's not what you are looking for.

I just got finished redoing my kitchen, and I actually decided to go with white cabinets for a couple of reasons.... I really wanted a chocolate brown floor, so that it would contrast with the adjacent hardwood in the living room, so I wanted light cabinets so that not everything would be dark. Also, the kitchen is fairly small so I thought the white cabinets would open it up a little.

I love the final result (the walls are more of a bluish grey than they look in the pictures)

I'm really no help but my current favorite pinterest kitchen .



Maybe a little over the top but..oh my, beautiful!

Sorry Samantha, I'm a wood lover! (That sounds like quite the innuendo...)

UMterps, I LOVE that floor. I'm debating wood (which the rest of my house has) or tile. I really really like the look of tile, but it's so cold in the winter! Your kitchen is so sharp!

Crazed, if I ever move into a castle, I'll come to you for ideas I think that kitchen is the size of my main level!

Have you tried houzz.com? So much awesome eye candy!

Also, I always recommend the GardenWeb home forums. The kitchen forum is full of 100k kitchens (yikes!) but also a lot of great advice. http://ths.gardenweb.com/forums/kitchbath/

Good luck! Keep us updated! I love this stuff!

Yeah, wow, that is a ton of white! We redid our kitchen a couple years ago, but instead of replacing the cabinets, we simply sanded the existing paint down and re-painted them. Kept the tile, got granite counter tops and stainless steal sink. New paint went a long way to make the area look 100x better.

The main kitchen area, there is another cabinet/counter area to the back left corner of the picture. Oh, and the knobs on the cabinets are now stainless steel too.

Cali, I was debating between tile and wood too. My contractor sent me to Lumber Liquidators, and they had a good selection of prefinished wood floors in a variety of stains. I almost went with a chocolate brown stained oak, but I had always wanted tile in the kitchen, so I stuck with it. I figure that I usually wear those fuzzy slipper socks in the winter, so hopefully the floor won't feel too cold!

I'm not much help but my dream kitchen has something like the feeding station at the bottom.
http://www.atticmag.com/2011/04/built-ins-for-pets/

Oooh, thanks for the links! I hadn't found either of those sites yet.

What a cute kitchen! It really makes the white cabinets pop in contrast to the dark counters and floors. I'm not a big fan of painting wood, so I don't think we're going to go that route, but I'm definitely intrigued by all of you guys who have made white cabinets work.

I have a runner down in part of the kitchen, and another throw rug in front of the sink, so I don't think tile would be so bad. And I so like the look of it...

Ahahaha, that's so cool! Lucy would be annoyed at being locked up (nevermind that I don't have a logical spot for it), but what a neat idea!

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Thanks so much for your input, guys! DH wants to play spreadsheets this weekend and crunch numbers and figure out what we have to work with, and then I can start seriously planning

Kitchen remodel? Actually, we're just finishing up ours! And I completely relate to your issues. We had a terrible, mostly white kitchen (lightly accented with urine yellow and avocado green) from the 1940s/50s. It looks amazing now, and we went with a lot of natural wood. I'll get some pictures! *scuttles off to get the camera*

You can keep the cabinets without having to keep the honey color. Just sand them down and stain the original wood to a dark cherry. Same with the sliding doors, which I agree are awesome. If they're made of solid wood, you can strip the paint off and stain them.

Yeah, I'm currently researching how to do that. It's definitely really tempting! They're a high quality cabinet from what I can tell, just really...outdated.

My problem is I have absolutely zero desire to do any of this myself. I've watched friends build/stain/paint wall units, retile floors and remodel bathrooms themselves, and have no desire to embark on such a journey myself. Thus, I need to budget for someone else to get their hands dirty for me

This! You can totally change the look of them.

My old boss had a gorgeous kitchen remodel done. They had dark red alder cabinets, stainless steel appliances, and slate floor. The counter was black soapstone which was way soft and got chipped easily. Black granite would look awesome though.

It was similar to this look, only with black counters and the walls were a terracotta color.

Here's my kitchen pics! Both the lighting and my camera are terrible, but bear with me.

Here's the kitchen when we first bought the house (also complete with the seller's decor, LOL). It was TERRIBLE. Everything dated from anywhere from the 40s to the 60s. No cabinet-level outlets. The upper cabinets were too close to the bottom cabinets, so you had difficulties fitting some appliances on the counters. No dishwasher. The lighting consisted of two bare flourescent bulbs, and the one above the sink was turned on and off via a pull chain. White or off-white everywhere, six different layers of lead paint on the cabinets, and the countertops and backsplash were a cream color lightly speckled with urine yellow and avocado green. The floor was cracking old sheet vinyl, also white speckled with urine yellow. *barf*





Here's my kitchen now! We literally gutted it all the way down to nothing and started over. I think the floor is my favorite part. Beneath that terrible vinyl was gorgeous 70-year-old hardwood oak floors. We sanded off all the glue and tar....took us nearly 18 hours of work...and refinished them.

We still have a few small details to complete, mainly the outlet covers and the cabinet handles, but we're just about done. The pictures really do not do it justice. The cabinets are walnut brown, a bit darker than they appear in the photos.

I didn't remodel. This is what my new house came with. It's a poor picture. It's not really this dark in the room... The cabinets are pretty accurate though. They're maple and a reddish brown color. The granite is browish speckled and you can't see it, but there's a dark, hardwood (maple again)floor with the distressed look to it...a tad rustic. I love the wider planks and the distressed look. So, I lucked out finding a house already done with a design/style I like. Often people have to remodel to get what they like. But it's good. You can make it exactly what you have in mind. The only thing is with my granite which is not perfect is that it's granite tile (cheaper to build) instead of slab. But the grout line between is extremely thin, so it's not a problem like grout usually is. If I were building a house or remodeling...and I could afford it, I'd probably go with slab, but it is significantly more expensive.



I like the white cabinet look too...both. It would be hard for me to decide if I were remodeling. But this is how my new construction house came, I like it...it's warm and pretty and looks like furniture. And since it's all open to the family room area, it kind of transitions nicely.

Good luck choosing. That's the hard part.