Background

Hi. I wanted to keep a journal of the progress of our kitchen construction. Sadly, I should have started this 9 months ago when we first started to plan the kitchen we hoped we could someday have. That 9 month process was much more difficult than I expected. I knew there were a lot of options to consider when it came to flooring, countertops, colors, etc., but what I didn't realize is that it would take a long time to actually get started. Considering our remodel would include the removal of walls as well as some unusual design requests, we wanted to work with an architect or a kitchen designer that would understand us. We also wanted to stay within our budget. Mixing these two things proved to be impossible in the end, so once we found a contractor, we wound up being the kitchen designers. We started at Ikea since we had experience with a small Ikea kitchen in our last house. We liked their cabinets but couldn't help but wonder what we would get if we went to semi-custom cabinets. After several meetings with a kithen designer (more of a cabinet sales person), we realized that the price of semi-custom cabinets were easily 5x the Ikea cabinets we already knew and liked. We liked the semi-custom aspect but realized that modifying the stock sizes or options led to a very large increase in the price. During this time we also investigated countertop materials, flooring and other elements that would go into our kitchen, and we also found our contractor. So the following posts to this blog will be a day by day (as often as possible) record of what is happening with our kitchen. The blog is called Three Mile Island Kitchen in honor of the disaster site (much like what we expect our kitchen to look like for the next month) as well as for the 9 foot (not quite three miles) island that we will be adding to the kitchen. I'm hilarious.