Wheadon House Tour - The Kitchen

{We recently moved to a new home. Today I'm sharing the kitchen. CLICK HERE if you'd like to see the entry way also!}

As a designer, I'm often asked, "What is the most timeless choice for kitchen cabinets?".  My answer has always been the same - white. White cabinets are a classic. It seems to me that they stay "in style" more than any other choice. In fact, when my son bought his 1920's home, guess what we found in the kitchen? The original wooden white cabinets! {We gave them a fresh coat of paint - CLICK HERE if you missed it.}

When I walked into our home for the first time, the kitchen pretty much took my breath away. I instantly fell in love with the the clean white cabinets & large square island.

It also has a lot of extras that I've never had such as a prep sink, walk-in pantry, a double oven {range version} & slide out shelves.  

And I still swoon every day over the range hood. Ahhhhh!

LESSON LEARNED: When we started moving from the old house, I slowly packed up the accessories because the other house wasn't sold yet & I didn't want it to look too empty for showings. It taught me a valuable lesson. The house actually LOOKED BETTER with less stuff - even if it was pretty stuff! Sometimes there IS such a thing as too much of a good thing. I've taken that realization to heart & tried to hold back a little on accessorizing the new house. That equals more negative space. It looks clean & I'm loving it! 

I saw the idea above for storage of dish soap on Pinterest & decided to give it a try. The three window pots are from Ikea.

Most of our furniture is from our old house, but it looks different here. Weird! For instance, as we shopped for a home, one of my rules is that we had to be able to fit our 8 foot {solid wood} Restoration Hardware pedestal table. It fits beautifully in the kitchen/dining area. And the nice thing is - now that it's not tucked away in a formal dining room - it gets noticed! One friend who came to my house for a {church} meeting almost once a week for THREE YEARS {how many hundreds of meetings is that?}, asked if I got a new table. Did I mention - this is the table where we had our meetings? Ha ha. The parsons chairs are on casters & they are so cozy to sit in. The rug is one of the few new things I have purchased because I wanted to protect our wood floors.

SPACE PLANNING TIPS: The baker's rack above was purchased at Costco many years ago & it is still one of my favorite things. At first, I wasn't sure there was room for it in the new house though. So I measured the rack, table & room - then mapped it out on a computer template. It looked like it could fit. But I still wasn't sure. So then I made life-sized templates of the table & the baker's rack & took them over to the new house. I put the templates on the floor to see how much space they would take. It looked like a tight squeeze, but still possible. Finally, I decided to take both pieces of furniture to the new house. We took photos of the space with just the table & then with the table AND the rack - then compared them to see which we liked. Everyone agreed that even though it is a close fit, it looked better with the baker's rack. Yay! 

That's about it. I hope you enjoyed the tour half as much as I am enjoying cooking in it.