kitchen design

Inspired by the online design contest, I have put together a "storyboard" of our proposed kitchen. I could not get everything exactly right, but it's close. Our cabinets have less red in them and are more of a chocolate colour than those shown in this photo. Also, our proposed floor will be 12" X 24" tiles in a shade somewhere close to the grey shown in this picture.

interior design - main floor

We met with our designer last week to pick interior finishes.

For the floor. we chose a maple floor in natural stain finished on site. We love dark floors but decided against it for a couple of reasons.

1. I strongly dislike oak and to do a dark stained floor in maple requires using an engineered wood floor. That's because maple does not accept stain evenly, so there could be a lot of variation in staining and the floor could end up looking terrible. In order to ensure a consistent quality of staining the only option is to use a factory stained engineered wood floor. While I like engineered wood floors, it would have cost about $10,000 more to put in such a floor.


2. Walnut was not really an option for us either. While it is easily stained on site, it is much softer than maple. With two little kids in the house, it would not take long for the floor to have dents and grooves all over the place. Sure, you could argue that dents add to the "lived in" look of the house, but I think I'd rather have smooth floors


3. Everyone we talked to who has had dark floors at some point in the past agreed that dark floors really show the dirt. Again, with two little kids, there is no shortage of dirt and crumbs constantly on our floors. On our current maple floor, that dirt is barely noticable. That's a look worth keeping.

We also picked a tile for the kitchen, powder room, mudroom and entrance. It's a 12" X 24" light grey tile with slight flecks in it. It has a look of natural stone, but it is also very simple and clean.

For the kitchen we wanted something fairly contemporary, but practical too (ie. not one of these pure white shiny kitchens that you see in magazines).

We were inspired by several kitchens including the one below:

For our kitchen, we picked a simple flat door stained in chocolate brown and we are pricing a white quartz countertop from cesarstone. The countertop we are looking at is not pure white, but rather white with with some flecks in it so that the crumbs and such don't show up so obviously. The flecks actually have some grey in them to pick up on the floor tile.

In a couple of weeks we will meet again with the designer to pick the upstairs finishes.

Putting a wall on the kitchen island

Here are a couple of model pictures to show what the kitchen island would look like with a 12 inch high wall on the dining room side.

Designing our new kitchen

So as we go about designing our new kitchen, we have one small but nagging question yet to resolve.

As you will have seen from the plans, we have an island in the kitchen. The question is, do we put a raised shelf on the side of the island facing the dining room or not (see examples below)? If we do, then cooking clutter in the kitchen could be hidden from view during dinner, but if we don't, we get the widest possible work surface, which could be great for tasks such as rolling out dough.

What do you think?