Today’s post is all about the appliances we chose for our kitchen. I’ll give you a tour inside each so you can get a sense of their capacity and how functional they are so you can gauge whether or not they are right for you. Or if you aren’t in the market for appliances you’ll get to snoop inside my fridge:) I approached Build with Ferguson for this partnership because I loved working with them in the past, I knew that they carried most of the appliances for the whole house that we wanted, and y’all, their showrooms are absolutely spectacular. They are a one-stop shop for everything you need (and they have way more than just appliances – faucets, lighting, flooring – anything to renovate, remodel, and even a lot of decorative elements). For me, I like my appliances like I like my men – intuitive, easy, nice looking, and high quality enough so they don’t break down. Unlike my men, I like them integrated or panel-ready if possible, or if we are going to see it – then ideally it’s a beautiful feature. We actually prefer less bells and whistles than maybe some other families as our needs are relatively simple. Plus it’s a farmhouse, not an episode of The Bear and so we skipped some of the more techy options there intentionally (which I get into later). I wanted the range to be the star (and it is) and the rest to be hidden but this is all just a personal preference and only you know what is best for your family. We are EXTREMELY happy with all of them thus far, so let’s get into it.
Now we shot a whole story for you about how cooking with induction and convection works, along with some learnings so stay tuned on that. More and more research is coming out FAST and hard about gas ranges, with different states enacting more regulations (including Oregon now), so if you are shopping for a range or are going to remodel soon, then induction is great to think about. The long and the short of it is that we love this range very much and are extremely happy with our choice. THANK GOODNESS. I was nervous, not going to lie, and yes, there was a short learning curve on temperature and speed – as was assumed, just like switching to an electric car. But we are so happy with it. Not only is extremely stunning (which is very important to me) but cooking on it has been GREAT and way less of a challenge to learn than I predicted. The quick concerns we had were about capacity and cookware, and neither has proven to be a problem at all. Sure, we had to buy some induction non-stick pans, but all of my former soup pots work on this. Additionally, we had to buy smaller cookie sheets and often use two instead of one for large batches, but we knew that going into it and it’s not annoying at all.
There are three ovens – a convection, a multi-functional (that has a traditional oven as well as convection, defrost, and more), and a broiler drawer. It’s all easy and GREAT. The only thing to call out is that you can’t put a massive turkey in the oven – To test this we fit a 13lb turkey on a 9×13 roasting pan but we haven’t been able to find a larger roasting pan that fits due to the handles that stick out (I’m still on the hunt, btw). So even though you have 16″ of horizontal width, the handles make them too big. More on this later, but essentially for us, this is totally fine as we don’t host Thanksgiving and if we ever decide to (with a ton of people to warrant a massive turkey) we’ll likely buy a countertop electric turkey roaster. You can fit everything else:) We love that this has multiple ovens and we use two at a time very frequently (double ovens FTW). It’s just so gorgeous, the top is so easy to clean and after a day of trying out every single feature (and even testing the speed of water boiling) we are so excited that they all work really easily. We bought the brass knobs separately, FYI. After doing so much research I’m happy to report that this 48″ induction range is the most beautiful on the American market right now and it works wonderfully. I will say that it can use a better “guide to cooking” rather than just a user’s manual, which is what my next post will hopefully help serve as…
This was a last-minute purchase because we kinda forgot about the hood. Induction will do that to you:) Technically you still need one by code, but there are no gas fumes which is nice. I burn things a lot (not more on induction – I just historically burn things and need to use a hood to stop the fire alarm). This one is good – we opted against anything splurgy honestly because you can’t see it and it’s not something we felt was super important to us, therefore a place to save. FYI you can go slightly smaller than your range when it comes to your hood (our range is 48″, the hood is 42″ insert and the build-out of the hood looks the same as the range).
This is our first foray into the columns versus the fridge on top and freezer on the bottom and we are very happy. Stylistically the side-by-side is simple and pretty, with less lines (almost looks like a piece of furniture). We wanted more capacity than we had before because we, like everyone, leaned into staying home more (even post covid) and we cook every meal with a ton of fresh produce. Both have ample capacity for our family of four. The fridge has almost 17 square feet of capacity, btw if that’s helpful to you.
We talked through it a lot and decided that for us, any bigger of a fridge would mean that things just get lost and then mold/go bad unless we are very, very on top of it – which we aren’t. We live very close to many grocery stores and really thought about how often we’d shop (one big shop on Sunday mornings – and a second shop for randoms mid-week). So we don’t need to hoard for two weeks and if we did it would just go bad (because of the size of our family). The natural reaction after covid is to go bigger and hoard more, but I’m telling you that for us we ended up buying more food at once, then it go bad or we couldn’t find it, so we’d buy more, waste what we had and then feel so bad about it. So the 30″ column is perfect for us. Whereas a larger capacity freezer means you can freezer hoard – and freezer goods obviously have a much longer shelf-life. Our 24″ freezer column has so much capacity which is such a good thing (cut to many a night where I make a big soup that no kid in the world would eat and the kids get some sort of chicken strips, pizza, fish sticks). We love a big freezer 🙂
In the fridge, you can adjust the shelves to fit your needs – we made the top one lower to make room for bottles of white wine. We obviously styled it out (you know, the “orange drawer”) trying to show you scale with products in a neat way that gave you a sense of its space. But they are all around 8″ deep which allows for one thick layer of produce or dairy – a block of cheese for scale.
The freezer has so much space – we can’t seem to fill it, or maybe we go through it so quickly with our fish stick/carrot stick menu…
I actually wish I had put in a 2-gallon jug of milk so you get a better sense of scale – it’s a LOT of space.
That berry basket of tomatoes is actually really large:) All in all, we are very happy with them and of course, you know they come panel ready like ours (which look like cabinets), but also BlueStar has over 1000+ different colors as well as stainless steel. I’m currently convincing my brother to buy BlueStar and he’s into it. We got these straight from BlueStar in exchange for services because the columns were new to the market, but Build also carries a ton of BlueStar appliances that you can check out here. I’m truly such a fan now.
The emergence of the drawer fridges is one that I fully support – gone are the days of the garage fridges. Is this a necessity? Nope. Does it get used all day every day – YES. And “amount of usage” is what I am placing value on these days to help me make decisions. Technically you don’t NEED hardly anything to live, and there is a level of convenience that for better or worse we love in this country and this convenience can enhance our day-to-day experience in our home. So we really tried to be as responsible as possible (not perfect, y’all we are not perfect) and gauge how much we will actually USE something before committing to it.
On that note, we use these drawer fridges a lot. These are for drinks, mixers, and kids’ fruit/snacks. We forewent the wine fridge because they usually don’t get as cold as we like them (because white wine isn’t supposed to be ice cold, we know, we know but I’d like a word with the wine fridge industry) so we have some white wine in here, too (lying down). But between beer, sparkling waters, and even some weeknight non-alcoholic “cocktails” these drawers are full.
These are solid additions if you are remodeling and you entertain a lot (or like us, work from home).
The VIP of drink appliances IMHO. It’s a very old joke amongst my team (and family) that I love very, very, very cold water. Another appliance that gets so much use and makes every drink feel more fun. We have this exact model at the mountain house and love it so much, so we repeated it in this kitchen, too.
To the left of the sink (a much-heated debate on location), we have our integrated panel-ready dishwasher that cleans like a dream.
As you can see we have a pull-out flatware drawer which we haven’t had before and really love it. They all stack so nicely and neatly (see below). We usually don’t have that much flatware so the left side is for cooking utensils.
As you can see it has a row for wine glasses (which we don’t really use because I’m the only one that has wine, so just one glass) and but I wanted to show you the function. Without the wine glass leaning you have an additional row for glasses.
All in all, we have ZERO negative things to say about this dishwasher. We use the “normal wash” every day which does the trick and the kids can easily load and unload. It has a lot of other features, but we usually hand wash our pots and pans so we don’t need it.
Every. Single. One. of these appliances is GREAT and while it’s not like I’ve tested every dishwasher on the market, we are genuinely happy with all of them. The ones that you can see shine (the range) the ones that just need to function do so perfectly for our needs.
A huge thanks to Build with Ferguson for partnering on this kitchen. We have loved working with them over the years and pitched them this partnership specifically with these appliances in mind. We did a trade for PR, photography, and social media services but I’ve done this a long time and know what brands and products I want to put my name behind. These are them. xx
Thanks for supporting the partnerships that allow us to document our projects so thoroughly. I hope you gleaned some valuable information. Head to stories to see more!
Kitchen Resources:
Cabinetry: Unique Kitchens & Baths
Countertops: Bedrosians Tile & Stone
White Oak Windows and Doors: Sierra Pacific Windows
Skylights: Velux
Tile: Pratt + Larson
Appliances (sans Fridge and Freezer): Build with Ferguson
Fridge and Freezer: BlueStar
Flooring: Zena Forest Products(Oregon grown and milled)
Lighting, Switches, Outlets, and Sink: Rejuvenation
Wall Color: Sherwin Williams, “Extra White”
Faucets: deVOL Kitchens
Vintage Island: Aurora Mills
Counter Stools: Fernweh Woodworking
Rug: District Loom
Brass Gallery Rods: Pepe and Carols
*Design by Emily Henderson and ARCIFORM
*Photos by Kaitlin Green
THIS POST WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED HERE.
