Cabinets seem so easy. I imagined we would pick a color and a style, decide where we wanted the appliances (including dishwasher) and the rest would fall into place. It wasn't quite so easy. I pouted. At least once. Probably more when I realized that we don't just want cabinets, we want the right cabinets. We HAVE to have a place for silverware and I MUST have a large enough cabinet to fit large pots and what do you mean we can't put the sink under the window and still have a dishwasher!!!
Its not an amazing view or anything, but what is a kitchen sink without a window above it? (I'm sure there are many nice windowless sinks out there that work quite well, for some reason thought, I didn't want mine in that category).
We had to face all the details. A smaller kitchen company was recommended to us by our mortgage broker (random, I know), I was fond of Ikea cabinets and the storage component options that went with them, and, of course, we wanted to talk to Home Depot and Lowes.
The first design from the local company was weird. A little too much design for our small space that needed an overhaul for functionality. We headed to home depot and Lowes during lunch breaks and after work and got some good ideas, but nothing stuck. I also realized that it is really difficult to get a "standard" price of a cabinet to try to compare apples to apples. These things really frustrated me. Finally, I love Ikea, but here... I think it made me cry. I don't quite remember, but I'm 99% sure. I tend to get really emotional when faced with big decisions, significant costs, deadlines, and conflicting opinions :-).
It was an awful experience. The "kitchen designer" (the employee in the kitchen section of Ikea) sent myself and the hubs to the computers where we struggled with the software, finally got the computer to give us a quote, which was a little over a million dollars!! No joke. It was a glitch in the software that added an extra million dollars on our quote, but I don't think that was the only glitch in the software. I left with a very bad taste in my mouth... and those were the cabinets I thought I wanted...
To make a long story short, the lady at the local store was super helpful talking us through the process and gave us several iterations of our kitchen design, one of which turned out to be "the one." She made sure we had the dishwasher by the sink, which remained under the window, and big cabinet for pots... everything we needed to think about but didn't know, she thought of for us. The company was also extremely willing to work within our budget, which made everything super easy. If anyone needs the name of a place to buy kitchen cabinets, just let me know ;-).
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