Anonymous wrote:OP your kitchen doesn’t sound that big so two things : limited open shelving as it looks great in a curated photograph but is a pain in day to day life. And cabinets to the ceiling. There’s always extra Holiday and party stuff that goes up there. Pull out pantry best thing I ever bought. Neighbor came over while designing his kitchen and ordered TWO for his kitchen. He also removed a wall. It was a small wall but made huge difference. We have the same house layout. Also those Schuler solid wood cabinets from Lowers we have those. Very nice.

Anonymous wrote:We are starting to plan a kitchen remodel. It's the first one our house has had since the 1970s, and almost certainly the only one I'll see in my lifetime. So I am really looking forward to having a beautiful, functional space. Our current kitchen is not only ugly, but also broken in just about every way, from cabinets to appliances. The space, however, is lovely, with a lot of large windows and sunlight. It's about 200 sq ft, part of a semi-open concept home which has some midcentury modern and modern elements and is definitely not traditional.

I want to go with a Scandinavian design, with a bit of open shelving. We are not planning to move anything or knock down walls or anything like that. The cabinets go in a straight line on two sides. So far I am super disappointed with the estimates and drawings I've gotten. We've had two contractors and a design/build come and do a preliminary measure. One contractor gave us a design with a cookie cutter kitchen and no open shelving and wanted over 20K just for mid-range cabinetry. We have a small bar area that looks really dated and his new "design" was just the same bar area with different counters. The second contractor didn't give us a drawing or anything, but said they didn't know how to do LVP floors, so we eliminated them. The design/build gave us basically the same thing as the contractor and insisted they had to put huge crown molding type things on top of the cabinets to fill in the space (we currently have cabinets that go to the ceiling, which is 96 inches, so I don't get that at all), and the look of it was just really not in keeping with the house.

Am I being unreasonable? Our budget is 65K, and that's about 10% of the home's value, and I don't even want to move anything. Is that too little for something that involves more than just sticking cabinets on walls in a different color? I feel like I could do that myself at Ikea and save a bunch of money.

Anonymous wrote:It’s been years ago but we used Lowe’s kitchen designer for layout. She did a great job and tho go t of lots of things I wouldn’t have. Pulls out on every cabinet and built in pantry with pull outs. Also our neighbor used HD and had every bell and whistle. Beautiful. Of course our homes only cost $900+. I found kitchen designers overpriced and their cabinets very expensive. It’s been 11 years and they look great.