I talk about the farmhouse construction ad nauseam. One comment (other than “SHUT UP”) that has been repeated, is “you could not build this place without the internet”. I’d agree, at least in so much as to say I would not be able to do as much of the work myself and with the budget I have if it were not for research and shopping through the internet.

The internet has really helped in the areas of “decision making”. The biggest tool has turned out to be Google’s image search. The kitchen cabinets and wetroom tiling are two good examples. Here is a page of results from my search of custom kitchen cabinets. In one instance, I used the search too look for layout ideas. A later use of the same search was to investigate ideas of door and drawer styles. Lately, it has been colors. The page of thumbnails lets me quickly discard color combinations without even seeing the full size pictures. I quickly open a tab for anything that *might* be interesting. After I have 10 or 15 tabs open, I start to page through them and discard the obvious misses. I whittle the list down to a few and then bookmark those in a folder. I repeat this a few times. Then I walk away to do something else. The next time I feel like picking up the task, I open my browser again and have it “open all bookmarks in the folder”. Then I page through the tabs and discard any that no longer interest me and start making notes of the rest. I’ll usually repeat this filtering a few times until I have a very small number of choices, any of which I would be happy with.

When the time comes, I’ll use the same technique for choosing the cabinet hardware.

On side note – I found an image of a simple door, photographed strait on. This is turning out to be a huge asset. I loaded it into GIMP (an open source equivalent to Photoshop) and preceded to clean it up and make make a black & white image from it. Next, I created a series of layers.. There are four primary layers – the whole base image, just the door&drawer inserts, horizontal wood grain, and vertical wood grain. The horizontal grain is cropped to the rails and the vertical covers the stiles and recessed panels. The combination allows me to simulate any combination of colors as well as painted vs wood finishes. The grains are just alpha channel – no color. I then can copy the base and insert images and color them numerous different ways.  I can turn on/off the wood grain as well. (All of this still does not mean I have settled on the final choices.) Sooner or later I should post the process in more detail but that will have to wait.

I used this same technique when researching wet rooms. I blogged earlier that wet rooms are much more common in the UK than here in the USA. I needed to learn all I could and it turned out using Google’s image search, made it easier to distinguish the websites that had the relevant information.