Kitchen coming together

Words cannot express how exciting it is to have the kitchen cabinets in place. There are a few issues we need to address, but it's beyond helpful to see the natural maple cabinets in their new natural environment.

We still don't have the natural oak floors down, so it's not exactly clear how the woods will go together. We just hope they don't compete too much!

I know that the maple will age and deepen some as time goes on, but we are now leaning toward a somewhat darker counter color than we had expected, especially once we brought over the tablecloths and sheets to try on the runway.

The photos don't capture perfectly, but everyone agreed that darker olive green did clearly look better than the two pale greens. Anila of ALine Architecture was on hand to discuss colors (and to advise on materials for the porch, which will have to be another post another day).

This led us to pull out the Cambria again: Collybrooke on the left, Ferndale on the right below.

 Collybrooke has a nice tone-on-tone swirl pattern, but it fades pretty quickly as you stand back. And it's still a little too dark and brownish grey, but close. Ferndale has lots of speckles, which we were trying to avoid, but the colors are nice and go well with the fully-leafed-out woods in view in the back.

Here is the Ferndale against our current Mint Green granite.

A little more taupe and browner chunks of glass rather that white swirls, but pretty close, right?

 

Here is the chunk of Monte Bello granite in the foreground on the light green "counter" and the Trikeenan Tweed Boneyard Brick and light green Motawi (which we can't afford but love) on the olive "counter" in the back.

Here are those tiles up close considering as backsplash:

 

Now I'd like to go back to check out bigger chunks of Cambria and also reconsider Chroma Sage and Caesarstone Rosemary (both pictured here, I think, with our bathroom floor tile and the Motawi and Caesarstone Buttermilk:) 

 

 We thought the Sage and Rosemary looked kind of drab before, but it might be worth getting samples to bring into the space now that it's laid out.

John has also just found Zodiaq, another engineered stone by DuPont that's sold at Lowe's. He likes Magellan Green, but I think it seems a little dark and am more partial to the Wintergreen, which has 25% post-consumer recycled glass. May need to check out in person, but that would require a trip down Route 1 on a hot day.

Tomorrow we are headed up to Amicus Green Building Center to check out their concrete options and Richlite (and to get our paint). On Friday we stopped by Artisan Concrete Concepts, pictured below. We could make up a custom color if we didn't want any of the standard ones he already has. The green is probably too lime, and there's no guarantee how much variation or swirl you could get.The more decorative marble-looking items on the wall and on the small table are not something that they typically do in large scale for kitchen counters. They come with a price tag, but they are really cool!