We knew going in that we'd be looking at a basic white shaker style cabinet with a light colored counter top. I didn't realize at first that painted cabinets are considered an upgrade over stained. It makes sense, though, due to the fact that imperfections are hidden a lot more easily by stained natural wood rather than painted surfaces. So I was willing to bite on that one. Stained cabinets were just never really going to be our style. The other option we hadn't really considered though was the type of overlay we wanted our cabinets to have. The Standard option was going to be a partial overlay, which in cabinet parlance, means the doors and drawer fronts would have only been large enough to cover the opening. A full overlay came as a bit of an upgrade, but I think the look of the cabinet is well worth the added cost. The full overlay cabinets also allowed for the additional inlay on the drawers which I was a big fan of. No glass fronts or open shelves or anything for us! For hardware, soft close hinges were a standard and we went with the handles as pictured in the sample cabinets (though I think ours will be about an inch shorter).
Countertops were a little more tricky. Granite is the standard option but we were really hoping to go with quartz. I liked the idea of quartz being maintenance free and less porous than other solid surfaces. We both liked the less "busy" color options on the quartz. So before we even gave a close look to the granite, we steered our salesman to the quartz area. The first sample we picked was found to be a "Level 3" option which would have come at an extra cost of $4,600. That sample went right back to the shelf. Unfortunately, even the "Level 1" quartz options were going to have a $2,500+ price tag attached to them. So that was a NO for me considering the flooring upgrades we have in mind. Next up was a "Level 2" granite option and even that came with a fee of about $2,500. Sorry... just can't do it. So we asked about the fallback option that we had seen in one of the model homes. We determined that to be Luna Pearl which was right in our list of standard options. No upgrade fees and we ended up with something we fell in love with in the first place! It turns out our kitchen is going to look very similar to the model we looked at after all!
Bathrooms, we kept pretty basic with a gray stain on the same style shaker door that we have in the kitchen and a white marble top with just enough gray tones coming through.
The last big decision is still in progress. While our home comes with a large gourmet island with seating, we fell in love with an even larger island when we visited with a different home builder. This was going to be a must-have from the very start for us! We'll still have the Morning Room area for more formal dining, but the kitchen island will be the more common eating area. Our cabinet salesman is working up a price for that add so hopefully it's not TOO painful! An idea of what we're looking for is below:
Minor complaint: since we're the first to be building in a new style and a new community with Paparone, there was a lot of confusion with our cabinet salesman. He seemed less than confident about most of the information he was providing us repeatedly stating that "this is how it's done on other communities so I assume yours is the same.. There's probably some shared blame on his part as well as the builder's (and maybe ours for being so aggressive). Paparone probably hasn't done the best job at spelling out to the contractor exactly what is already included in our purchase price, but the cabinet guy also didn't have to schedule us so early if he didn't have his ducks in a row. I think we should be safe with about 90% of our decisions this past Saturday and it would be really disappointing if something changes drastically!
In other news, our permits should be approved any day now which means I should have an actual answer the question "when are they going to start digging?" soon!
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