Updates... got my new (to me) fridge! Someone needed a bigger one, so I got the perfect, only a couple years old, has an icemaker, no flaws 28" wide fridge for $115. I paid about $10 to rent a ramp so we could load it easily in a friend's truck. I had been planning on around $250, so I feel like I got a screaming deal. Now I need to clean out the giant french door fridge in my laundry room and sell that beast. I'll miss the cold water in the door, but I'm putting in a filter system under my sink, and got that icemaker I wanted, so I think I'll survive.
I had my meeting with the Lowe's kitchen designer yesterday. Turns out, only their most expensive brand offers unfinished anything. She had built it all in one of the cheaper brands and so we had to spend some time redoing. And then the total came out to... $8000 (after 20% off!). I know cabinets are going to cost me dearly, but that seems a bit nuts. (It's nearly 3 times the cost of doing oak pre-assembled from home depot). So I'm still looking for my cabinet supplier. I checked Barker cabinets online... that comes out to around the same price, although they customize sizes, so I would fit the space a bit better. And I won't have to disassemble to stain, since they're RTA.
Anyone have thoughts on the boxes being made from particle board vs. plywood? The particle board was why I decided not to go with the home depot stuff in the first place. I'm not sure how much doing ply instead of particle increased the quote on the other cabinets, but I could see it adding a fair amount...
I did come out of that meeting with a few renderings of the cabinet layout. It's exciting to see at least that part coming together.
Looking at this... I see a few options to save money and still have my dreamy kitchen:
I have 3 triple drawer bases. Drawers are expensive. I can change those all to single top drawer/single door bases. Might be more useful next to the stove anyway for the pots/pans.
I can take or leave the knee drawer under the window. (It would be level with the other cabinets. The rendering program just couldn't understand that someone would want to have cabinets in front of the window.)
I did decide to leave a tiny bit more room for a fridge, so the 15" by the fridge will be a 12". This should give sufficient room for the fridge door to open to more than a 90 degree angle. And possible eventual room for myself or an eventual owner to have options when replacing the fridge.
The pantry area is currently made up of 3 cabinets. This is a layout I came up with using the cheap home depot stuff with no real size wiggle room. I could do this with two equal size double door cabinets instead, which would save a little. I'm also not feeling the corner thing right there. They don't have the sizes to make it work all the way up and I was going to stick a couple of shelves in the middle to fill in that middle gap.
OR. I could leave it they way it is and just have some new doors made.
Maybe not quite leave it. There's an 18" hole to the left where things get pushed back and lost. I would open it up on that side to match the other. Probably would open it up at the top a bit as well to make the top shelf easier to access. Axing the pantry cabinets would drop around $2000 from the price, so that's really tempting.
As always, I welcome any thoughts! Who knows someone that sells unfinished cabinets? :)
(And if anyone wants to tell me how to resize images smaller, that's a thing I tried and failed to do.)