house project: we have cabinets! (almost)

While we were in Paris, not much happened at the house. Our cabinet guy–who we love–was a bit behind schedule (what can I say? He got POPULAR), so it made sense to wait until the week we got back to start installing the cabinets.

This is the moment we’ve all been waiting for: the kitchen!! We’ve been working with Chris for a few years now (since this project got delayed multiple times), so it’s truly been a labor of love on both our parts. We never dreamed we’d do custom cabinets, but after our architect steered us Chris’s way and we realized he could fit within our budget, we haven’t looked back. There have been so many advantages to going custom–I can’t imagine why anyone wouldn’t at this point! We were able to design it all to exactly what we wanted, and were even able to adjust the size of cabinets up until right before he started construction.

We got to see the cabinets in his shop a few days before install to make sure they looked good and make any final tweaks.

It was crazy to see them all set up! My first reaction was to the color–it looked so different in his workshop than I imagined it would at home. I knew the increased light would change how it looked, which resembled much more of a ‘French country blue.’ The color is Gale Force by Sherwin Williams, which is actually already in our house. One of our accent walls and the brick around our fireplace has been that color for the past few years, and when I was trying to figure out which ‘blue’ to choose for the cabinets, it finally hit me that I should simply go with the one I already had and loved.

Second, I was just shocked at just how big our kitchen is going to be! And he didn’t even have any of our black walnut cabinets set up for us to see in the workshop, since some of the pieces still needed a final spray.

Here are some of the black walnut pieces, including some shelves:

Install started the Wednesday after we returned.

Here she is!

The color is PERFECT. The base cabinets are set in place, and we’ve had the countertop people come out to measure. Once the countertops are in place, we can put the rest of the cabinets up, as four units ‘sit’ on the counters and reach from countertop to ceiling.

Below: our black walnut unit (or a small portion of it):

This will eventually be an entire wall of black walnut. The ‘missing’ cabinets on the left are actually refrigerated drawers, so once we get our appliances and they get hooked up, Chris will put the drawer fronts on them to look like they are cabinets. The unit directly beside it is in front of a chimney (the yellow plaster), so because we went custom, Chris was able to make a very shallow drawer and cabinet unit so that it appears to be the same depth as the refrigerated drawers next to it, but instead fits in front of the chimney. All the way to the right is our pantry (existing, it appears they’ve stored a cabinet unit inside for now), and it will have custom black walnut doors that match the cabinetry, so it all looks like one big unit all the way across.