Project Tuliptree: The Kitchen
I am so excited to finally share our kitchen plans for the house! When I threw the poll up last week for which room you guys want to see the renderings for first, the Kitchen won by a landslide! Just like the rest of the house, we are trying to improve the look of this kitchen with minimal work and cost. We knew we wanted to keep the existing cabinetry, take down the uppers, add a big long shelf, add more lighting and upgrade appliances and aesthetic (duh). I know , I know— you guys were hoping I was keeping the suuuuper pretty stripped wallpaper in here... If you are following along in stories, you know that wallpaper is the BANE of my existence. I have had enough wallpaper removal to last me the rest of my life. It was HARD, but some areas easier than others. But that isn’t why you are here. You want to see what our kitchen is going to look like, right?
THE CONCEPT
HARDWARE:
We wanted to go classic with all of the hardware in the house. I have had my eye on these knobs from Rejuvenation for a long time now. And apparently so has everyone else! They are on backordered until the end of the month, but I know they will be worth the wait! We also went with these pulls for the drawers. I may or may not have snagged enough brass plated floor vent cover for the main level, too since they were on MAJOR sale. Sadly, they are not online anymore, but if they do suddenly appear again, I will throw it up on stories for y’all! They’re SO good.
CLICK ON THE RENDERINGS BELOW TO SEE THE BEFORE AND AFTER SIDE BY SIDE
PAINT:
Let me just say that paint is a MIRACLE worker. Like— it can be the easiest, cheapest, least committal thing you can do in your home. If you hate the color- paint over it. Same thing goes for the cabinets. Although if you are hiring out like we are to paint the cabinets, then you have to consider the cost of the labor if you feel like you are the type to change your mind often. I knew I wanted something classic and timeless. If you read this post about how we picked out appliances, you know that we wanted to do a creamy white color for our cabinets. We pulled a ton of inspiration from Studio McGee’s kitchen, but specifically the color. We ended up landing on “Creamy White” by Benjamin Moore. We actually had this color matched in Sherwin Williams in the “Extreme Cover” line. I found a coupon for buy 5 gallons, get 5 gallons free, so we ended up getting over 20 gallons for under $300, and will end up painting our mantle, and french doors in my office the same color to tie in the kitchen a bit. The other gallons aside from the Creamy White color, will go to the walls in eggshell in the color Simply White, by Benjamin Moore.
CLICK ON THE RENDERING BELOW TO SEE THE BEFORE AND AFTER SIDE BY SIDE
LIGHTING
We are so lucky to be able to partner with Hudson Valley Lighting on all of the lighting in the house! If you have been following me for a while, you know that we have partnered in the past with HVL quite a bit and are planning on bringing over everything from our old place into the new house! One of them being the Hopper chandelier! We had this gorgeous piece over our living space in our apartment, but in the new house we are going to hang it over our breakfast nook! I am SO excited to have it in a new area. I love how it ties the minimal black moments throughout the house. We are adding 3 sconces over the long shelf that are doing instead of the uppers. We went with the Lupe sconce for the shelf and we couldn’t be more excited!
DETAILS
We are still honing in on the details for the kitchen. I REALLY want to add a fluted detail on the end of the peninsula and underneath the counter top as well by the stools. I was thinking something like this: I love the classic, but subtle detail that it gives, plus I think it’s something we can do easily as an “add on” to our existing cabinets. Another detail that I want to play around with is adding a brass toe kick to the cabinets. This is also an easy thing that we can add-on later, after the cabinets are painted. I think it totally gives the kitchen that extra “oomph!”. As for the shelf, we are still TBD. I really want the look of marble up the backsplash, but that may not be in the budget. We are still tossing around the idea of doing white concrete countertops (major inspiration and motivation from this post and this post), versus doing an epoxy white marble effect DIY project. Either way, I think we will do the DIY marble effect epoxy method on plywood, and mount it as a faux backsplash, and then a thick white floating shelf. We are still tossing around these ideas, but hopefully will land on something soon! Our cabinets get painted next week, so after that and the walls are done, I think we will have a bit of a better idea! We aren’t afraid to tackle the counters once we move in. I think we can do it on a weekend, with some planning and research— and help of Tom!
While we are talking about DIY… we would also love to build out some custom cabinetry around the fridge to make I look a little more “custom”. We scored this Kitchen Aid French door fridge off FBMP for $800. It’s in PERFECT condition, and has zero damage to it. We are going to frame this into the area we moved the wall over to, and build out a pullout broom/dyson closet with storage for things like crockpot/small appliances above. We want to add that same reeding detail on the cabinets we build for around the fridge and add cute little latch hardware to the doors to add something special.
THE WALKWAY ARCH
If you remember at the beginning fo this renovation, you remember that the first thing we tackled was moving this wall over. It felt a bit right walking form the living area into the kitchen. This wall isn’t supporting anything major, so moving it over 20’’ wasnt a huge deal at all. Tom got to work, and ripped out the wall, and pushed it back. The result of doing this opened up this walkway in a MAJOR way, allowing me to make my arch dreams come true… and be able to see more of the gorgeous kitchen from the living room!
THE STAIRS
I know I keep saying “if you’ve been following along in IG”… but really— I have talked about the stairs a handful of times, I just haven’t showed y’all the rendering yet! We pulled up all the carpet on the stairs, to find gross, stained, plywood. We knew we needed to replace the treads in some form. In order to match the treads to the hardwoods, it was going to cost $50/tread. Times that by 14— thats a lot of ours budget! We did some research, and went with unfinished, solid pine, bullnose stair treads, that we will stain/paint black. We ordered a new stair newel post, balusters (here and here) , and will reuse the handrails.
We hope to be moved in in 4 weeks! I know we said 6 weeks to start, but we ran into some speed bumps with the floors! Ugh. Real life. Our current timeline is to have walls prepped and painted by a week from Monday, and lay floors the week of Thanksgiving with about a week of a buffer after! Wish us luck!
XO, Sam