Cabinet, Counter and Flooring Selections for a Coastal Cottage Kitchen – One Room Challenge Week #2

Hello everyone! This is week 2 of the One Room Challenge. If you are finding me through the One Room Challenge, welcome to my blog where I share my passion for creating comforting homes by thrifting, sewing and a little diy-ing along the way! While I’m not averse to buying new. I love being able to stretch a budget AND get that “layered over time” look that comes from incorporating pieces that have had a previous life! You can follow my decorating journey on the HomeSpunStyle Instagram.

If you missed my post from Week 1 where I revealed that we are doing a full renovation of our galley style kitchen, you can find it here. 

While work on the shell of our kitchen is underway, I wanted to share our selections for cabinets, countertops, shelving and flooring. We actually made these selections last fall, knowing that the lead time for the cabinets was estimated to be 3 months due to pandemic-related supply chain issues.

The look and feel I’m going for is a blend of a fresh, minimal coastal kitchen and a cozy, collected English country kitchen. I want to pay homage to the seashore setting of this home yet at the same time incorporate the vintage pieces that I love.

Cabinets

The main consideration for choosing a cabinet line was being able to purchase matching drawer and door fronts for the base cabinets we plan to keep. The existing cabinets are structurally sound and well made but we wanted a shaker style door. We needed 10 replacement doors and 4 replacement drawer fronts, along with 7 new cabinets. We settled on the Lowe’s Diamond line which offered both. The shaker style door is called “Jamestown” and the color we chose is “Icy Avalanche” which is a very pale gray. It feels coastal. The cabinets are solid maple with a factory painted finish.

Lowes has 4 different cabinet grades in the Diamond series, depending on the type of cabinets you need. Ours are a combination of “Reflections” and “Prelude”. The Jamestown door style and Icy Avalanche color were offered in both series.

After we finalized the cabinet order, we were able to color match paint to the “Icy Avalanche” door sample and get a head start on sanding, priming and painting the existing base cabinets. We also started prepping the moldings we plan to add to finish the upper cabinets.

Countertops – Quartz or Quartzite?

I love, love, love marble countertops but as you probably already know, they are high maintenance. The closest thing to marble that doesn’t have the maintenance issues are quartzite and quartz. Do you know the difference? Quartzite is natural stone and varies in hue and veining from slab to slab. Hence, you pick your exact slab at a stockyard. We used quartzite in a previous home and it definitely looked similar to marble. My only complaint is that it sparkled more than I would have liked. Still, it had a nice organic feel and looked impressive in our large kitchen where you could look at it from afar. It held up well and we had no issues with staining.

Quartz is a man-made engineered stone formed by combining 90 percent ground quartzite with 10 percent resins and polymers which “glue” the pieces together. It allows the manufacturer to offer standardized colors and veining patterns which means you can make your selection from a small sample and know that your countertop will be exactly the same as the sample. Both quartzite and quartz have similar price points and are almost equal in resistance to stains and heat sensitivity. In my opinion, however, quartz does not look like natural stone. The veining is so uniform that it doesn’t have the movement and organic feel of quartzite or marble.

So what did we choose for our coastal cottage kitchen? We chose quartz. Here’s why – We started this renovation last fall, during pandemic mandates and shutdowns. Frankly, it was easier to go to a big box store and make a selection from the samples, rather than shopping around to hand pick a slab. Second, our kitchen is narrow, so there are no long sight lines where you can really stand back and see the beauty of a natural stone countertop. We settled on LG Viatera in “Lumina”, purchased at Home Depot.

Because this is a small kitchen, we decided to use the same quartz for the backsplash as well. This will give us the clean, simple lines I envisioned and provide a nice backdrop for layering on some vintage pieces.

Floating Shelves

I knew I wanted as few upper cabinets as possible to visually widen our galley style kitchen. We settled on doing upper cabinets on one side of the kitchen and mostly open shelving on the other side. I’ve had open shelving before and loved the convenience of having our everyday dishes in plain view and plain reach by everyone. And of course, they lend themselves beautifully for display.

We chose solid wood floating shelves that are supported by steel rods attached to studs in the wall. This gives the appearance that they are floating.

I considered both Semihandmade and J Thomas Home and in the end went with J Thomas Home – a husband and wife team in Kansas that makes the shelves. Their shelves were slightly narrower in depth and slightly less thick than Seminhandmade, both of which worked to our advantage in our small space. We ordered 4 red oak shelves in the lengths we needed (2 at 34 inches and 2 at 32 inches). Since we were having them stained fairly dark, Emily suggested using red oak, a cheaper option than white oak.

They worked with us to customize the shelves with an underside groove to accommodate the undershelf lighting we planned. The shelves shipped quickly and the J Thomas team was great to deal with. Unfortunately, I wasn’t 100 percent pleased with my pecan color choice. It was much darker than I thought it would be. We also felt that we needed a hard sealant on them to stand up to every day kitchen wear and tear. Mr. HomeSpunStyle sanded them down to their natural state. He then stained them in a medium wood tone and then applied three coats of quick drying polyurethane in a satin finish, Between coats he steel wooled them and wiped with tack cloth before applying the next coat of polyurethane. This finish will be impervious to water marks from slightly wet glasses and scratches from dishes being slid around.

The most important factor in installing the shelves is to secure them to the wall studs, especially if there will be a lot of weight on them such as in our case. While the walls were opened up, we photographed the location of the studs to make it easier to “find” them after they were covered up with sheetrock.

Tile Flooring

For the floor we chose Bedrosian tile in Makato Umi Terracotta, purchased online, directly from Bedrosian. I liked the hex shape rather than the long rectangular tiles than ran the length of the old kitchen and accentuated the narrowness of the space. I also like the warmth of the terracotta color (English country vibe) to ground the space so the kitchen doesn’t feel too ethereal.

So these are my picks for our galley coastal cottage kitchen reno. Be sure to follow Home Spun Style on Instagram for sneak peaks of our progress. And stop back here on my blog for weekly updates where I’ll be sharing lots of photos and details.

And you can check out the design plans of the other guest designers on the One Room Challenge Blog.

Thanks for following along! 

Debra