Too Many Variables

We spent an hour or so with the contractor discussing the kitchen remodeling on Friday evening. He talked us out of rash and radical knocking down of walls or opening doors to other rooms which would have been expensive and of real little value. He did talk us into granite counter tops, tile floors instead of wood and moving the refrigerator to the back wall. He left with a sketch and measurements with the promise of an estimate in the future.

We spent almost 2-1/2 hours in Lowe’s of North Augusta on Saturday afternoon, broken up by a brief lunch break, with a guy designing cabinets. He had already worked some stuff out after having talked to us, but because we opted to move the fridge, that wall had to be redesigned right off the bat. Then we had to change all the other walls because of the moved refrigerator and he had something to the left of the stove that we didn’t want there. When we were almost finished Donna realized that there weren’t any real draws anywhere, so we shuffled a bunch thing around all over again.

We worked from a default style and color to build the layout and at the very end we tossed some semblance of a counter top on the thing so we could see a computer generated rendition of our new kitchen. Exhausted and with our heads spinning we left it with the designer going to send us a screen shot of the design and we promised to come back later next week.

Lowe’s carries about a half dozen lines of cabinets and we were building from the Shenandoah catalog. They have about a dozen styles of doors to choose from and each style can be made out of 4 kinds of wood. Each kind of wood has anywhere from 6 to 12 finishes. Hardware is included and there must be 10 or so styles of pulls and handles each available in 4 finishes.

Add to that there are about 15 color/styles of granite to choose from and then there is something on the order of a hundred color/styles of tile for the floor. How does one choose from all that?

The contractor said pick the granite counter top first and build from there. The design guy says pick the cabinets and work from that. We have chosen the color glass tile we like for the back splash and are trying to match up the other stuff from that…