Renovations, The Buffalo BurrowChoosing the Burrow Kitchen Cabinets December 18, 2019 This is a sponsored post by Lowe’s Home Improvement. All opinions are 100% my own. Here’s a flashback to our last kitchen over at The Buffalo Bungalow. When it comes to designing kitchens, it’s really easy to focus on the pretties and the feel. But choosing cabinets (both the type and the layout) is really the crux of your kitchen design. And after designing a good many kitchens, I think it can be the most overwhelming part of the process! Making them actually fit in your space, choosing the function and layout you want, it all feels really complex. And I always get the most questions about cabinet dilemmas when I share our kitchens. I’m excited to dive deep into our kitchen cabinet process for our new kitchen at the Burrow. Today, I’m going to talk about how we chose the line and style of cabinets and then tomorrow, I’m going to share our detailed cabinet layout (yes, even down to where the spatulas will go!). We had a meeting scheduled in Lowe’s cabinet department to officially plan and layout our kitchen. I was so excited because we’ve never had help in laying out and designing our kitchens. We got there early to explore the displays and get an idea for what was available. Before going, we didn’t know much about the different lines or what we wanted. I’d heard about the Diamond line and was interested to learn more. Diamond is a custom line of cabinets, you guys! I used to equate big box stores with only having basic stock cabinets and you had to go hire an independent cabinet maker to customize anything. Not so, friends! The first thing that I noticed with the display were all of the color and door style options. I assumed we’d be getting unfinished cabinets that we’d have to then paint in the color of our choice. But the Diamond brand has several lines: Intrigue, Reflections, and Prelude. We were immediately drawn to Intrigue because it gives you the most options. It comes in the entire palette of of HGTV Home by Sherwin Williams paints. They have the largest color palette in the showroom! That was really appealing to us for a couple of reasons: 1.) The cabinets will come painted with a professional finish, so that is a better more durable paint job than we’d get ourselves. We’ve learned this from experience with past cabinets. We want our lower cabinets, especially, to be as durable as possible. Chris said before we went that he wanted me to be open to a stock color, so that we’d get this better finish and I told him it wasn’t going to happen. Surely, they didn’t carry my unique sage color as an option! It felt too custom. Oh, but they did! 2.) The color choices are HGTV Home by Sherwin Williams paint colors, so you can head over to the paint department and get the same color to match! This was huge for us for future touch-ups, but also because we’re building custom upper cabinets in here as well and want to paint them to match. I already knew that I wanted a sage-green color, so having more color choices was important. I was immediately drawn to this display on the wall. It’s Retreat by Sherwin Williams. While it looks pretty perfect in this photo, it’s darker in person. The tones were just right, but I was picturing something slightly lighter with the tile. The cabinet expert we were meeting with was so helpful! When I told him what I was looking for, he pointed me to additional swatches on the display. This is where I found my color HGTV Home by Sherwin Williams Escape Gray! I was immediately drawn to it and knew it was perfect. It felt like Retreat, but was a bit lighter. And I’ve learned over time that paint in your home feels slightly darker than the chip to me, so lighter was what I was looking for. As you can see, there are so many other color options! I was also blown away by how many door styles we could choose from. I was really expecting a handful of choices that came in maybe three color ways and y’all, the options feel unlimited. There are so many different styles. There were beautiful, intricate styles that looked like a work of art. We were more drawn to the simple shaker style we love that also fits well with the rest of our house design. We decided to go with the Paloma style because we loved that it was shaker, but with a slight lip around the inset. We’ve had true shaker in the past where that creates a ledge and it was so hard to clean because dirt and dust just sat there. I love how these give us a little detail, but still feel simple. You can also see below all of the color choices! We sat down with Will, the resident Cabinet expert at Lowe’s and gave him the room dimensions and appliances we’d chosen plus their placement for him to start to build out our room. It was so fun to watch as he plugged in our specs and then it automatically showed him the space that was left for cabinets. It was a very detailed process to make sure everything “works.” I came with an idea of what I wanted that I’ll go into more detail about tomorrow, but he took it to a whole new level. There were areas I thought a bigger cabinet would fit, but with his expertise and the system, he saw that the door wouldn’t open unless it was a few inches smaller due to clearance. There were so many helpful things like that! We sat with him for awhile and talked through all of the details. And then, two days later, we got this mock-up in our e-mail. I’m just showing you a few screen shots for example. There were lists of cabinet sizes and diagrams. But I was so impressed with these shots! Obviously, this doesn’t have our design, but it is the exact to-scale dimensions of our space, appliances and cabinets. It was so helpful to actually visualize how the space will function. In all of our previous kitchens, I’ve just sketched it on paper and sort of crossed my fingers until it was installed. Getting this professional help made it so easy and was so re-assuring! Now, tomorrow, I’m going to talk in more detail about the layout. You’ll get where we put drawers and what will go there, etc. There was just too much good info for one post!
Amy says December 18, 2019 at 11:08 am Sure glad you’re doing all this work! If I ever build a house one day I’ll just copy everything and be perfectly content 😉 LOVE IT. Reply
Lindsay says January 9, 2020 at 4:29 pm Oh my goodness, thank you! That’s the biggest compliment 🙂 Reply
Monica Anderson says December 18, 2019 at 11:43 am Lindsay, I am so excited for you!! When we bought our current house (3rd owners) we discovered they were Diamond brand. These are great cabinets! The previous owner was pretty hard on them, and I have to admit I was too at first. But they can take a beating! I’m so glad you got the shaker style with a small lip too, cause we have the plain shaker and they collect dust like crazy. Can’t wait to hear more about the new kitchen tomorrow! Reply
Lindsay says January 9, 2020 at 4:29 pm Oh Monica, this makes me so happy to hear! We loooove them! They just got delivered and I couldn’t believe the quality when we unpacked them! Reply