Kitchen island cabinets Design

Everything is starting to fall into place with my kitchen, and after two months without a kitchen sink, I couldn’t be more excited about this forward momentum!

I finally got all of the old flooring moved out of the kitchen (rusty nails removed and wood stacked in my garage waiting for my hallway ceiling project). The new flooring is ready and waiting to be installed (it’s been acclimating since Sunday night), and FedEx delivered my new flooring nail gun yesterday. I have my mind made up about my flooring design, and I’m excited about my decision. The supplies for my concrete countertops are being delivered this afternoon. And my brother-in-law Bill is coming over on Sunday morning to show me how to finish up my electrical stuff. (I’ll just be installing switches and outlets. He’s already done all of the hard parts.)

Yep, everything is falling into place.

The only design decision I’m still wavering on is the design of the countertop/breakfast bar area on the sink side of the room.

As a reminder, here’s where the sink will go…

My plan all along was to extend the countertop about 12 inches towards the breakfast room to create a larger countertop that has the feel of a larger island with an area for barstools on the other side, kind of like these kitchens…

But of course mine won’t be an island since it’ll be connected to the side wall of the kitchen, so it would look more like these…

Now I’m second guessing that decision. The reason? Well, it’s because of that header that I had to install when I removed the wall, which will be right over this countertop.

My concern is that the header being right above this countertop area will kind of visually separate the kitchen side of the countertop from the breakfast bar side of the countertop. And if the countertop is all one solid piece, with no delineation between the “kitchen countertop” and the “breakfast bar, ” and I’m wondering if that will look funny. As in, it might look forced, or like an afterthought, or like an obvious remodel where I removed a wall and weirdly extended a countertop into the adjoining room. Or maybe I’m way overthinking it. (But y’all are used to that by now, right?)

So I’m thinking that something like this would actually be better…

I generally prefer the solid, single level countertop, but after giving it some thought, I think I might actually prefer the design in the picture above for my particular situation. It would make the header and the half wall under the breakfast bar all look very intentional, rather than possibly looking like an afterthought where the kitchen was clearly remodeled with a wall knocked out and the countertop extended into the next room.