The Black Kitchen Cabinet - Goes With Anything!
When many people plan the remodeling of their kitchen, they somehow feel obligated to choose medium brown woodgrain oak-type cabinets. These days, those cabinets, stainless steel appliances, and granite countertops seem to be the defacto starting point for the majority of renovated kitchens. And if you really like those finishes, that's fine. I like granite and stainless steel myself - but I liked them before I started seemingly seeing them everywhere. Now, when it comes to those standard oak (or more likely oak veneer) cabinets, well, those I never liked. My tastes run more towards something like a black kitchen cabinet. My kitchen remodel was a do it yourself renovation. I even built the cabinets. Now, don't go thinking I'm a professional carpenter or anything - far from it. But my kitchen was small and there aren't a large number of cabinets in it, plus I renovated it in stages, doing one section at a time, then taking a break before starting the next one, so it wasn't that bad building the cabinets myself. Anyway, the main colors in my kitchen are light colored natural wood, black, and stainless steel. As a matter of fact, those are the only colors in the kitchen with the exception of two shades of blue-grey on the walls.
Probably not a common color scheme, and very likely not the one you'd choose. But it's my kitchen, and illustrates a point I've made a number of times on this site. When you remodel your kitchen, do what YOU want - not what magazines or TV shows say you should be doing. Make your kitchen conform to the way you use it, and make it appeal to your tastes. If you normally only do any real cooking on weekends and your fridge is full of microwaveable food, then you probably don't need a professional six burner gas stove. Save your money, or spend it on something you'll actually use. While you do want to consider resale value to some extent, don't make it the primary criteria unless you're in the process of selling right now and are only doing a kitchen remodel to get a better price. Back to the black kitchen cabinets. I will say that my kitchen is the only part of my house where I regularly dust vertical surfaces. Black shows dust more readily than any other color, so if you decide to go with it, be prepared. I should have been ready for this since I have a black car, but I guess I expected it to be different inside a house. Live and learn :-) I'd do it the same way if I had it to do over again anyway. This is where I was going to say "When it comes to kichen cabinets, black's the new black".....but I figured nobody would get it. Which didn't stop me! If you don't feel like building your own kitchen cabinets and also don't want to pay an arm and a leg for black ones, you might want to check out Ikea's offerings. They offer a style called Nexus in "brown-black" which looks pretty black. Some of their cabinets also come in Rubrick black/stainless steel. If you're not into black, they also offer a number of other kitchen cabinet colors. Additionally, the Ikea products conform to the European Union's standards for formaldhyde emissions, which is much lower than the US's. Actually, the US has no standards at all for this, which is another reason I built my own cabinets, but that's a story for another day. |
