Kitchen Island Display Cabinet

13 Dec Kitchen Island Display Cabinet

Can you tell I have kitchens on the brain?

The room we are adding onto the kitchen definitely became more real yesterday when they put down the framework for the foundation (which will be poured tomorrow).  The back of our house looked like this before.

And now it looks like this.

Progress, right?  Very exciting.

The room will be mostly windows (which will be here by Christmas!), and the exit to the backyard will be towards the front on the right side of the room.  I am super excited about the windows, which will be 6’4″ tall and three feet wide.  They will be fully paned (so twelve panes per window to tie in with the rest of the house), and will have a three paned transom at the top.

I am envisioning an eat-in area, probably some sort of banquette set-up with chairs in the back left corner, a desk area on the back right side, and a comfy living room area in the front part of the room.  Catch the vision?  Ha!  I know it’s hard to see, but I see it in my mind.

Back to the kitchen…we have an island in the middle of the room, and instead of the minimum standard 14″ (you really want closer to 20″) counter overhang required for a counter bar-type area, there is only 10″.  In my opinion, it is an awkward place for a bar area, especially since there is only 39″ between the countertop and the pantry cabinets.  So if someone is sitting at the counter, and another person wants to go through that pass-through area, it might be a bit of a squeeze.

The picture below is what the kitchen looked like when we moved in.  I’m including it so you can see what I am talking about.  The kitchen had been remodeled by the previous owners, and while the bones of it were good, I have changed a lot of it aesthetically.  Pretty much the only thing the same are the cabinets and the countertops.  It looks like a totally different room now!  (pictures coming soon)

So as you can see, the tiny counter overhang is just…awkward.  See how close the stools are to the pantry?  I have always wondered what to do with it, and I believe my answer may have come a few weeks ago when my husband and I visited a kitchen store for inspiration on another kitchen project, and we saw a model of a glass-front cabinet on the bottom of a kitchen island.  So pretty, so smart!  I don’t think it would be too terribly difficult to turn that space into a couple of cabinets with doors, right?

Houzz

Thomas A. Conway, Designer

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Traditional Home

Dream Home Design

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What do you think?

I don’t have any estimates yet on what something like this will cost, but I think I’m going to have my carpenter come take a look at it.  I’m imagining I would have the cabinet doors made the same as the upper cabinets in the room, and maybe put antiqued mercury glass in the panes so I could store things in there that may not necessarily be pretty.

Have you seen cabinets in a kitchen island before?  Did you like them?