Moving To The Next Phase!

Scott and I are totally ready for the next phase of our renovation. We've been paying off the deck and our new bed and we're finally ready to jump back in.

Saturday we decided to go in to Home Depot and design our kitchen cabinets. It took two and a half hours, but we chose what cabinets we wanted, colors, hardware, and set up plans. We got the total: more than $6,000. Ouch. But Home Depot has a price match guarantee, so we took the plans over to Lowe's to see if they could beat it. We were incredibly surprised to find that their quote came to almost $2000 less than Home Depot's!

We like Home Depot better than Lowe's, though.

So we took out the printed list of all the different cabinet pieces and their prices and brought it back to Home Depot, where they were happy to replace all their prices with Lowe's prices, saving us tons of cash. They were also having a sale on their custom cabinetry, so we got an extra $1000 off our order! Total, after taxes and delivery fees and all the little extras we got, we ended up paying only $4600, and they threw in the hardware for free.

We freaking LOVE Home Depot!

We'll have the cabinets delivered sometime at the end of October, and then we'll start ripping everything up in the kitchen. We'll be really careful with our current cabinets, since Mim wants them when we're done for her downstairs kitchen. They're so old and ugly, so she'll have to refinish them, so we're just going to give them to her for free. She also wants our appliances when we get new ones, but that will be a long time from now.

So we'll rip out the cabinets and move the appliances out of the way, then we need to finish up the drywall where the back door used to be (which means we'll need the inspector to come over sometime very soon) and build the little half-wall the peninsula will be up against. After that we can paint at least the part of the kitchen where the new stuff will be (it's a huge room, so there's really no need to paint it all at once) and then we'll need the countertops.

The countertops are going to end up being almost as expensive as the cabinets themselves, and it looks like Lowe's won't have lower prices to match on this one. They'll be a speckled Corian acrylic that goes SO WELL with the cabinets, flooring, and paint we've chosen. So until we get the cabinets delivered, we're going to have to scrimp a bit so we can afford to order the countertops soon after we get the cabinets put in.

Our kitchen will be gutted for a while. I'm going to have to figure out where to put all of our dishes and such while we don't have any functional cabinets.

After we finish all this, we're going to have to wait a while and make money for the next phase: flooring. Brazilian Cherry!