When I started thinking about cabinetry in the new house I knew that I wanted a lot of built in’s but not really built in’s in the traditional sense. We had lots of built in bookcases at the last house and, while they were nice, it was hard to fill them. I was looking for more relaxed built in’s like a mudroom area, kids study area, and an awesome laundry room.
Our architect looked at all of my pictures and told me that all those cabinets would be expensive. Then our builder looked at our plans and gave us an estimated cabinet budget. He told us that it was a normal cabinetry budget but that with the amount of built in’s that I wanted it would probably exceed that number. Since we wanted to stay as close to our budget as possible (or under, ha!) I was determined to get them all as inexpensively as I could.
I started out working with a local kitchen designer who I was referred to through our realtor. (She doesn’t have a website but I’ll be happy to get you her info if you’d like it!) It turned out that she was a Mom with small kids just like me and was restarting her cabinet elevation business from home with her kids. Talk about someone that I want to support! So I sent her, I’m sure, way too much information, and links to all of my appropriate Pinterest boards and she first sent me this picture.
As I’m sure you can guess, I LOVED it. The clean lines spoke to me as did all the functionality that I wanted that she had managed to fit into the first wall!
We then spent the next few weeks working on designs for the kitchen, mudroom, laundry room, and pantry. She sent me pictures of things that she thought I would like and we went back and forth modifying sketches. She somehow managed to turn all the pictures and ideas that I loved into cohesive designs that I was blown away by!
After a few weeks we landed on final designs and she brought me a number of copies of dimensioned plans for the rooms. I was able to then take them to numerous places to get estimates on the cabinetry.
More on that process to come…..
