Week 7: Digital Love for our Virtual Kitchen

Yes, yes, I know again with the late posts. I still haven't posted on Sundance yet (I have a ton of pictures to go through!), but I promise I will soon. In the mean time, I thought I'd give you a brief update on our kitchen.

Last week Justin and I met up with our contractor at the IKEA in College Park, MD, to design our kitchen.  Apparently, they have software that you can upload to your home computer, so you can design your kitchen yourself.  The two of us are not good at that type of thing (I've attempted programs such as FloorPlanner with no success), so we decided to seek help from professionals.  When we got there, we were greeted by Abel, who assisted us with every step of the design process.  He told us that he was in the process of getting his master's degree from the University of Maryland in architecture, so I figured we’d be in pretty good hands.  Our contractor gave him the measurements and Abel entered in all the information.  After all the numbers were inputted, we got to the fun stuff. 

Abel had a very cool British accent which was reminiscent of my Garmin GPS

He put in the type of cabinets we wanted and all of our preferences (e.g. I wanted a large under counter sink).  With the three-dimensional images, we were able to get a good idea of how our kitchen would look like.  After seeing our 3D kitchen, we even added things we never thought about.  For example, I thought I only wanted a couple of the cabinets to have windows, but after I saw how good they looked, I decided to have all the upper cabinets have windows.  That just means that we need to have nice/colorful dishes to display.  J  Also, I was deadset on having an eat-in island in our kitchen; however, since our house is pretty narrow, having a kitchen island would be difficult.  We wouldn't have enough space to walk around it, and have the other features that we wanted.  Instead, it was Justin’s idea to set our kitchen up in an L-shape, which would give us some stools to allow the eat-in option, but yet still maximize our space.  After going through our preferences and specifications, Abel came up with this:
 



Pretty cool if I do say so myself!