Kitchen Resources

The way our projects typically work is I sweat the design and details, Anne keeps an eye on the bigger picture and makes sure all of my detail-sweating doesn’t result in budget creeping, and in the end it works out beautifully.

I’d be afraid to tally up exactly how much time I’ve spent researching every aspect of this project; I have no doubt it would be literally hundreds of hours. These are a few of the sources of information and inspiration that were most helpful to me, in no particular order:

• Garden Web — If you’re doing any sort of work involving kitchen appliances, fixtures, materials, etc, do a Google search for “gardenweb [whatever you are looking for]” and you will find your answer, or dozens of excellent reviews, or people having the same problem/question as you. Without fail, I have never performed that search and not found helpful information. If you want to find first hand experiences with any and every high-end professional appliance/countertop surface/accessory you can think of, Gardenweb has hours of reading for you. The site isn’t much to look at but the content has been invaluable to me.
• chezerby — These people are just badasses. I came across this site while researching kitchen things, and was in awe of basically every single thing they’ve done. Pure inspirational pwnage.
• Nathan Young — We’re using a company called Viola Park for our cabinetry (more on that in a later post) and while searching around for other projects by them, I found this site that happened to be in the midst of chronicling a great kitchen remodel. Not only did their progress and updates feel a bit like looking into a crystal ball on our own project (the cabinetry and colors will end up being very similar) but they did a nice job of documenting the process along the way. This inspiration may be more meaningful to us because of the cabinetry connection, but there are a lot of good posts about process and decisions that anyone would enjoy.
• AJ Madison — If you’re interested in pricing out appliances online, this is the place. They may not be the absolute lowest price but they’ll be close, and they carry seemingly everything. Turns out, we may not end up actually ordering anything through them (for reasons I’ll get into in a later post), but I can’t tell you how many times I referred to this site while trying to figure out which appliances we were going to go with.