UncategorizedKitchen Series Day 1: The Basics March 11, 2013The kitchen is the first room in the new house that we will be tackling so that we have a working one as soon as possible. We’ve been focused on designing it recently and am so excited to share those ideas with you this week! For the next seven days, I’m going to be doing a little series on our new kitchen. I’ve heard so many bloggers talk about this topic. It’s tough when you have a very specific design style to make your home a place that totally reflects you and your family, while also considering what future buyers might think. I don’t think there’s a right answer to this balance and unfortunately, I won’t be able to give you a black and white formula for how to do this. I do believe that you have to live in the space and do what speaks to you, but there are times to keep resale in mind. For all of these, you have to compare your style and design intentions to resale trends and then compromise. I don’t think there’s a perfect balance between a house that your family totally loves and every single buyers who walks in will totally love. So, this week I’m going to talk about how we’ve balanced that in the kitchen and hopefully, help some of you battling similar concerns. This week, you’ll see three main areas come up over and over again: 1) Trends in Home Design 2) Standards for your Area 3) What do you love? Each day I will tackle a different aspect of our kitchen and how it fits in with preserving resale potential, but also making this kitchen a room I crave spending time in. *** Today, I’ll be talking about kitchen basics. Basics are the big-ticket items that are very costly to replace: cabinets and appliances. I’ve seen so many cute kitchens with vintage appliances or bright colored cabinets. I think some buyers would love that, but others might be turned off. Granted, this is where you have to evaluate your OWN style. If that’s the look you love, then you have to weight whether or not that fits with resale standards and if it doesn’t, are you okay with that? Thankfully, the basics weren’t a huge compromise for us. Going classic with cabinets and appliances is a good bet for resale and that’s really what we love. I like white cabinets and trends say that bright, white, classic kitchens are appealing to most buyers. As you can see from these images I chose, I seriously love shaker cabinets. And, those seem to be very popular with the public, but this is somewhere we had to make a budget compromise. I’ll talk more about this later, but we were given free cabinets that needed to be painted white and are very classic and simple. We can’t justify the cost of shaker cabinets. But if you’re buying new, white shaker is one of the most popular types of cabinets right now. I see why! On to appliances… Stainless appliances have become the standard in kitchen design. I’ve seen so many awesome kitchens with other color appliances, but stainless are classic and seem to look nice, but blend in. We had to buy all new appliances for this house. Yes, stainless is more expensive, but it has become the standard in our up and coming area. This will come up with another topic this week and is something you should definitely consider when doing your own design: what does your area demand? Is something too high-end for your area that you won’t get a return on your money? Are you hurting your future resale potential by putting something in that’s more low-end than your area demands? So, yes, it’s the standard in our area, but it doesn’t hurt that we like that look. So, we are starting to paint a picture here…a mainly white and stainless picture…a neutral picture. That brings me to my biggest point of the day: Go neutral with big-ticket items. Again, if this isn’t what you love, then you have to evaluate that. But, it’s much easier (as I’ll discuss later in the week) to change a rug or even a light fixture than to replace cabinets or appliances. So infuse your style in smaller ways that aren’t as intimidating to future buyers. If a buyer hates your cabinets and appliances, they probably aren’t buying your house because you’re talking about a huge, very expensive fix. All buyers have different opinions and you will never please everyone. We learned that with selling our last house. But going with the industry trends for big basic items, as long as you love them, is a good bet. *** Tomorrow, I’ll be switching it up and talking about a design decision we’re making that some say is horrible for resale, but oh how we love it. {find these images here}