Bye Bye Cute but Useless Kitchen Desk

Hello lovies! Hope you all had a fabulous weekend and are ready to start off a GREAT week...I only say that because it's my Birthday Week! Yay! Yes I said WEEK not day...I figure the older you get, the more you are entitled to so instead of having just one celebration on the actual day (tomorrow), I should get to celebrate all.week.long. Of course, my lover boy husband just shakes his head at me and laughs and says..."we'll see babe!" Haha, he's so funny and I fall more and more in love with him just for putting up with my craziness :)
We were busy little bees this weekend; we've had some projects just a brewin' for months and months now but being that we were on a very tight budget with the wedding and all, we had to put those ideas on pause but as soon as we got back from our honeymoon in mid September, the play button has been on full force! When we first moved into our little house, I loved the built-in kitchen desk because it was just so little and charming and cute but after living here for four years, it's become the gatherer of clutter and despite it's cuteness, it's really pretty useless. For wedding gifts, we got these beautiful new Caphlon pots and pans and as we were trying to put all of our new cookware away, I was like literally in tears because there just wasn't enough room for everything {insert panic attack} so my loving hubby just hugged me tight and sat on the kitchen floor with me with our pots and pans starring at us in the face and that is when our idea was born..."what if we took the desk out and added another custom-made cabinet?" We both LOVED this idea...panic attack over...we just crammed everything in the cabinets and started to focus less on the clutter and more on the solution! Luckily we know a guy who does cabinets so all we had to do was bring him the measurements for our new beauty and one of our cabinet doors so that everything could be matched...since we were getting a deal on it, we had to wait our turn which was no biggie since saving money was much more important to us than having it done ASAP...this little beauty was created and we brought her home late last week and installed it this weekend...I literally did the happy dance because of all of our new room for our pots and pans...this mama's kitchen is finally going to be organized! You can tell in some of the pics that the wood grain is a little different...it didn't make me overly thrilled that it didn't match up 100% (because I'll admit, I'm a bit of a perfectionist) but I'll get over it. Chris thinks they used red oak versus the white oak that our existing cabinets are; our kitchen is full of custom-made cabinets that are rounded at the sides so we thought that might cause a bit of a problem as well but not at all...you'd never know the difference and honestly, when we get our new counter-tops installed and the new tile back splash and new paint color goes up, you'll never know the difference...we're very happy with the results...and for $350.00 for the custom cabinet, including installation, who can complain?! Hope you guys like it as much as we do!

The cute, charming but useless desk:

 So cute but it just had to go!

 Buggy wanted in on all of the Saturday morning excitement so grandpa Jim put her in the cabinet! She thought it was so funny and was not a happy camper when we took her out!

 The new addition = LOVE :) Above this new addition, will be floating shelves that will be stained the same color as the cabinets; there will be three shelves that will have our white dishes on them, decorative stuff, etc. We didn't want to add an upper cabinet as it would close the kitchen off too much so open, floating shelves will be the perfect solution!

 Look at all that space!!!!! Hello organization!

So this is going to be the new look...it's a glass tile back splash from LOWE'S as well as a solid, quartz counter-top from LOWE'S; it's the Allen Roth brand in the color Wheat; originally, we wanted to go with the concrete counter-top look but with the oak cabinets and the warm, wheat-y colored tile that we have for flooring, it just didn't look right...so we continued on our search and then found and fell in love with this counter-top...it's going to be the perfect balance between warm and cool tones and being that the hubs won't let me paint our cabinets, we're limited with choices...he is totally on board with painting all the trim in the house white as it will brighten things up tremendously and we will accent the kitchen with fun colors...I'm thinking green but we will see! I'll keep ya posted as the kitchen projects continue on....thanks for stoppin' by!

xoxo,

Amanda