Kitchen Finishes

So Kyle and I had a fun-filled field trip to the exciting city of Flint, MI. Well, maybe we woundn't call Flint exciting but we did find our granite slab for the kitchen which was great. The company we worked with is located in Mt. Morris near Flint so it took us about an hour and a half to get there on Friday morning.

We toured through the yard where all the granite slabs sit and wait patiently to be adopted by a loving family. Our granite was sitting out in the cold rain, shivering... well I was shivering but loving every minute of it. Our Granite is called "Steel Grey" and it is from something called Group A granite. Group A granite is affordable because it's not super exotic in its coloring but still undoubtedly beautiful. Another Group A granite would be, the very popular Uba Tuba (which is really fun to say out loud).

Here is our granite paired with our back splash tile. The tile has a lot of greys, whites and even some green hues that I think look nice with this granite. The granite was pretty wet outside that day which makes it slightly darker than it would be inside.

Here is the close up of the Steel Grey. It has some bigger pieces but mostly smaller grey flecks. I really like the colors in this slab. Even though it is grey, it doesn't feel cold and gloomy to me.

We also took a trip to Canton, MI to visit one of our favorite stores, IKEA! I would love to be locked over night in that store. There is so much to see, it's hard to tour the whole store in one day, no joke. We have spent entire afternoons wandering through their show rooms and marketplace.

For this trip we only had 45 minutes till they closed so it was get in and grab what we needed, and what we needed were kitchen handles. We decided to keep the look modern and sleek and go with stainless steel pulls for all the drawers and doors.

Here are the smaller handles that will be used on the majority of the cabinets. These are 9 5/16" long and are called "Lansa". At first Kyle was skeptical about the size but in the end these sleek handles won us over. Once we saw them in a real kitchen we loved them.

Here is the longer version which is 13 7/8" long. We decided these larger handles would look better on the longer drawers by the cook top. All in total we have 56 handles in the kitchen. We bought 8 of the long handles and 48 of the smaller ones.

This is an IKEA show room kitchen with both the 6" and 13" Lansa handles. It sounded odd at first to go with 2 different sizes but we really like it. Thank you IKEA!