We’ve experienced several living spaces in different scenarios over 20 years. We are grateful for the variety of places because we know what is most important to us now.
BUT there have been a few things we haven’t experienced that lead us to change our minds during this process.
We learned so much during our time living downtown. Which inspired us to go towards a completely different direction with a house. We scaled back and wanted a simple layout.
Since we are doing our own projects, it’s more time consuming. However, the silver lining is that for awhile now, we’ve been able to “sample” living with certain things in a certain way.
After our house of 10 years being semi-open and have lived in a loft apartment-we wanted those walls taken out in the new (old) brick rancher.
We have been able to play around with cabinets before ordering counter tops. We lived for awhile to see where things were most practical for us. Thank goodness because we have changed things up multiple times!! Austin has made several custom cabinets for our living needs and just recently we made changes to our (what we thought would be fine) corner base cabinet. We kept all of the existing cabinet bases, Austin made some, and ordered a few. The corner one was a cabinet we ordered. Only to discover after sample living with it… we don’t like it. So, Austin will customize it as well.
Sink-same thing. We’ve had both a standard stainless steel and a white apron farmhouse sink. We thought we wanted a deep industrial stainless steel this time. Until we experienced it. It’ll be switched out too.
The island-this space was important to us because the kitchen is where we gather. This is where we migrate to, eat, have conversations, goof off and simply just hangout. Our original plans for an island were small. Thankfully we played around with space, placement, the cabinets and by using a temporary piece of plywood for a surface we were able to have a much bigger island.
So, don’t rush through life. Enjoy each phase. Keep exploring. Don’t settle. Seek out different experiences so that it allows you to discover what is fitting or not fitting for you.
(The kitchen/island/cabinets are unfinished here)