Hi, I started using Conestoga back in 2010 when Casey was about the only one here who had them. I was nervous but took the plunge. Love their RTAâÂÂs! In my last house my husband and I built this kitchen with full overlays. The finish was still perfect three years later when I sold. In the house IâÂÂm in now we are doing inset cabinetry in the master bath. One is not harder than the other to assemble. Although I buy my cabinets from Chad at Cabinetmakerschoice the cabinetjoint has the best Conestoga assembly videos.

Don't feel you have to enforce vertical symmetry with the need to line the coolers up with the stacked bottles. If slightly wider ones are cheaper and would work, the go with that without a qualm. And i think having them the same dimension actually weakens the overall design, a bit. You'll notice that in colored picture, the bottle stack and the cooler doors don't line up, and it still looks well-balanced. Notice, too, that there's even an optical illusion-created discordance between the stacked bottle rack on the right and the strongly vertical-orientation of the glass-paneled doors to the left on the other side of the TV. So just making those two sides match didn't result in an eye-sweet balance, no matter what the tape measure may say. In your case, I think the strong apparent verticality of the coolers' slab doors may make them seem narrower than they actually are, creating a top heavy look to the wine racks above. This violates the general sense we have that things should be bolder, and stronger-appearing on the base, and successive layers should get lighter, narrower, smaller, or whatever. In our second drawing, with the coolers moved inward, the optical-illusion of their narrowness is resolved. Also it may just be artefacts of the layout but the D-shaped raised trim pattern on the sides of the narrow lower doors strikes me as unattractive. Also door hinging should be book-matched, or disguised to look that way. HTH L.

I'm not sure "co-design" is the operant term. Co-evolve? Co-hallucinate? Co-riccochet? or Zig-zag as a tag team? We've been married 40 years. This is our third project on this house. It's DIY with DH being most of the Y. I started this one with a hope for a really distinctive muse, to make this former little postwar Midwest tract house look like the oldest house on the block, a Swedish farmhouse that had been here for a century and a half. I really thought I could do it. But this was my dream only and at a certain point in the planning I abandoned it. We now have a "cute" addition at the front that does make the house more symmetrical than previously but the only thing I can do to it to make it mine on outside is to work on making it look slightly mod, slightly quirky, and NOT like a craftsman bungalow or other tract house pseudostyle that's popular right now and that DH sees and hears about from construction trades friends. "Death of a dream" is one of the comments I made on one of the threads. I have conjured up and destroyed so many visions for this kitchen that I blush to remember them all. The one I see now is, for better or worse, the one I'm gonna live with for a couple more decades. Or more. I guess it's okay. I have reserved the opportunity to buy appliances at a later date and hope that living with the space will make it more personal as time goes on. I was trained by my mom from childhood on how the wife of a strong personality works behind the scenes and tries to assert herself and occasionally wins. DH would tell you that this is my design and my vision. But if I kept a running list of his "wins" and mine, he would be surprised to see how much influence he really did have--a great deal, I assure you, starting with how he and the designer ganged up on me regarding windows and where the range would go and how the ceiling would connect. Once he and this guy and other structural experts he consulted had set up the parameters, I just worked within them; but I also made a lot of choices knowing that I _could_ have chosen things that DH dislikes, but would have felt terrible about doing it. I could have made many choices to spend more too, but I know that this would be counterproductive for the marriage, starting with very different wood cupboards that were much more elaborate and much more expensive but would have given me a thrill to own and handle daily. This is not my kitchen, despite what he says. It's our kitchen. Money and practicality and the infrastructure were more important than my whims. I do wish that we had made different decisions about flooring. I really should have had cork for my health --we talked about it from the beginning but the idea went byebye at some point and he chose wood for kitchen and tile for lobby and hallway. My feet, legs, and back will always remember that compromise. No, that concession. I wrote here at GW at one time about how I had misunderstood his tastes at some strategic times. Trying to get him to commit to "I like that, I dislike that" was very hard, but then once I'd make a choice or at least an inclination, sometimes the judgment came down surprisingly hard against it. Often this was when I was trying most to please him, leaving me very confused. I no longer pretend that I can predict what he would say he likes or dislikes. The damn 50 cent porcelain floor tile I picked out from a remainder pile that we used in lobby gets praise from him over and over. Whodathunk it? And once we committed to that, then my box of other samples quietly got put into a closet because they were wrong with it. And that caused a chain of other decisions that are now "cast in cement" so to speak.

If you have a traditional or mid-mod look going, check out Reuvenation's pulls. We've ordered from both them and some of the lower cost competitors, and their stuff is a notch above for cabinet hardware (particularly if it's a latch or has moving pieces; less of an issue for pulls, but still some nice ideas and designs to look at!) It's pricey, though....