A meeting with Fast Freddy

Yesterday Ashley and I met with Fast Freddy (how Perry, our contractor, introduced him) who would be creating all the trim for the house. This includes crown molding, baseboards, closet bars and shelves, bathroom vanities, living room and upstairs landing entertainment built-in, laundry storage, dining room chair rail, and my favorite--the kitchen! To prep for this meeting, I quickly sketched out the layout I wanted for the kitchen, as it's the most detailed space.

General notes about the kitchen--we're painting the cabinets an off white, our granite countertops will be black (probably Black Impala...going to pick that out this Thursday), and an off-white subway tile backsplash. The floor is wood and the island top will be made out of pecan. 

About my sketches (Fast Freddy was happy I made these by the way--I wasn't sure if they would be annoying or not but he said it was a lot more useful than me just telling him what I wanted). The windows will be framed by open shelves and the other cabinets will reach to the 9 feet ceilings. I'm not a huge fan of cabinets that go all the way to the ceiling but I know my housekeeping style doesn't include dusting on top of high spaces. Why let dust bunnies accumulate when I can have more storage?

In between the fridge and range I want a space in the lower cabinet that has a divider that can help my cutting boards stand upright. I hate having to store them laying flat--it seems like a waste of space. I thought I wanted a lazy-Susan feature in the corner lower cabinet but nixed that idea when FF told me it would eliminate my two drawers. Nope! I want my drawers and I think I'll have plenty of storage in this kitchen without being able to fully access the very far back of the corner.

I love that this house has a pantry beneath the stairs. And I love that I'm going to have a desk area in the kitchen. Really, there's a lot I love about this house!

Here's the look of the kitchen, ripped from a magazine.

And work has already started on the trim. FF and his assistant are trimming out the doors. We're going with flat wood trim (really MDF) instead of the more traditional beveled trim. Because of that, all of the doors have to be trimmed out (otherwise the doors would have come with their casings and trim ready to go.

Here's one of our doors. I'm really pleased with the two-panel design. This looks more like a farmhouse than the 6-panel doors we've had in our other two houses. You can see the flat trim here. Ashley commented how in our first house we replaced all the flat trim with the fancier stuff and now we're building a new house with the old stuff. Ha!

The kitchen. Note where the sawhorse table is...that's approximately where the island will be--and how it will be positioned.

Perry told us that the trim part is his favorite piece of building a house. I can see why after spending an hour and half walking through our house and deciding how we want everything, even down to some open shelves in the laundry room (due to the window taking up so much space we can't run the cabinets wall-to-wall--but gosh, sunlight in a laundry room? I'm not complaining!).

When I asked Fast Freddy how long all of this would take he said two to the three weeks. Seems fast to me!