How Sue Turned an 80s Kitchen Into the Room Her Family Never Wants to Leave
Sue from Plymouth Township will tell you: the condo was perfect from the moment they walked in.
The setting. The open floor plan. The marsh view. Her husband was standing in the living room. She was in the master bedroom. They called out to each other at the same time: I could picture us living here!
There was just one problem. The kitchen was still living in 1985.
Cherry cabinets. Dark granite. A tidy little island that made sense for a different era, a different family, a different life.
Sue and her husband had moved into what they already knew was their forever home: “They’re going to have to carry us out of here,” she quips. And the kitchen wasn’t keeping up with the rest of the home.
Something had to change. Because, if the kitchen is the heart of the home, it must have a soul that matches the family it invites in and never asks to leave.
The Third Time Around
This wasn’t Sue’s first kitchen project. It wasn’t even her second. Mans had designed her kitchen in the old farmhouse downriver. They’d designed her daughter’s condo kitchen in Canton. Two different locations, two different designers, two very different spaces—and both times, the result was something Sue loved.
So when it came time to reimagine the kitchen in Plymouth Township, the decision wasn’t really a decision at all. She called Kim, a kitchen and bath designer in our Canton location.
There was one thing she already knew she wanted: inset cabinets. The flat, frame-flush style that looks effortlessly high-end and is notoriously difficult to install. She’d asked about them at Home Depot first. The designer there—a talented one, Sue is quick to say—came back with a beautiful plan and then quietly admitted they didn’t have the installers to execute it. Inset cabinets are that demanding.
Mans didn’t blink. Kim had done this before. So had the crew.
The Paradox of Choice
Anyone who has walked into a kitchen showroom and tried to make fifty decisions at once knows the particular paralysis that follows. Cabinets. Hardware. Countertops. Backsplash. Sink. Flooring. Each choice depends on every other choice, and the combinations are effectively endless.
Sue had been through this before. She knew what was coming. What she didn’t expect was Kim.
“Kim made my life so much easier,” Sue says, “because she gave me limited choices.”
Not unlimited options. Not a catalog and a prayer. A curated set of options, pre-filtered for Sue’s style, her budget, and the home they were trying to complete. Kim had looked at everything—the coastal-casual aesthetic of the rest of the condo, the light, the layout, the flow—and narrowed the field before Sue ever had to wade into it.
She also gave Sue something most homeowners never get: a full visual of the finished kitchen before a single cabinet was touched. Top view. Side view. Every angle. The ability to see what she was getting, react to it, and change her mind—before the point where changing your mind becomes expensive.
Sue had asked for open shelving with glass-door hutches throughout the kitchen. Kim delivered exactly that. Three separate areas, just as Sue had imagined.
Then Sue looked at the renderings and reconsidered.
“I thought, Oh, gosh. I have to keep all that glass clean. What am I going to put in them? Whatever’s in there has to look neat all the time.” She asked Kim to pull back: one open glass section, solid doors everywhere else. Kim changed it without a word of frustration.
That’s not just good service. That’s a guide who understands that the vision in your head and the vision in a rendering are two different things…and that helping you close the gap between them is the whole job.
The Crew That Thinks Ahead…Just Like Family
Good design is only half the story. The other half is what happens when the crew shows up.
Before a single cabinet came down, Kim coordinated a pre-construction walkthrough. The flooring specialist. The contractor, Joel. The store manager. All of them, together, in Sue’s kitchen, mapping the project before it started.
There was a plumbing question: where would the new pot filler and prep sink run? The answer was downstairs, through the office ceiling. Fortunately, it was a suspended ceiling. They checked before they committed. It worked.
There was a flooring transition question: ceramic tile in the foyer, to be replaced by hardwood. Old-school tile installation meant a concrete subfloor that would need to be jackhammered out—adding complexity to the transition. They identified it in advance. They planned for it. No surprises mid-project.
And then there was Joel’s detail that Sue still talks about: the outlets.
“It’s so silly,” she says, “but it’s our favorite thing.” No outlets in the backsplash. The quartz runs clean and uninterrupted across every wall. Joel routed channels under the upper cabinets and tucked the outlets there—invisible from the kitchen, completely functional, and impossible to achieve if you’re just looking to get the job done rather than get it done right.
Inset cabinets, which Sue had specifically wanted and specifically couldn’t get elsewhere, went in without incident. Joel, Dave, and Jeff worked the doors until they were perfect. Wherever a finish nail went in, someone came back and painted over the hole. A finisher named Corey handled the touch-up work.
“I could tell you about every one of those guys,” Sue says. “They’re like family. They’re just good, kind people who care about the customer.”
The Kitchen That Changed the House
The renovation finished. Christmas came.
Sue’s son and daughter-in-law came with their kids. Her daughter came up from Ann Arbor with her two. The island—the big one her husband had insisted on, the one that meant giving up the dining table—held the spread. Two people worked at two sinks simultaneously. Nobody bumped into anybody. Nothing felt crowded.
“It wasn’t even close to chaotic,” Sue recalls.
Her daughter-in-law pulled her son aside and said: I want a kitchen like that.
Her daughter was taking pictures and sending them to friends before dinner was over.
The book club showed up a few months later. Six women who normally met at a restaurant settled in at the island at 12:30 and didn’t leave until 6:30. “They said, I really like it in here, ” Sue remembers fondly. “And it was just like, whatever we needed was right at hand. It’s where people congregate and you want to have everything at hand. We did.”
That’s what the right kitchen does. It doesn’t just function. It pulls people in and holds them there. It becomes the reason people stay longer than they planned.
Sue already knows what’s next: the main bathroom, still wearing its 1985 Whirlpool tub and dated finishes. Kim and Joel have already been in to measure. Joel has ideas about a pony wall to hide the shower controls. Kim has ideas Sue hasn’t even thought of yet.
“I just feel like I’m in good hands,” Sue says, “because they do this all day long, and they’re good at what they do.”
She’s right. That’s exactly what it feels like when the right people are behind your project.
You Don’t Have to Picture the Whole Thing Yet
Sue knew the feeling she was after. What she didn’t have—what almost nobody has—was the ability to hold every choice in her head at once and see the finished room before it existed. That’s not the part you’re supposed to bring. That’s the part MANS brings.
“It’s so beautiful,” Sue says. “I’m so happy with it.”
When you’re ready to start, MANS can help you figure out the details : the design, the cabinets, the finishes, the order to make decisions in…all the choices you haven’t thought of yet. You bring the feeling. A designer like Kim brings the plan.
You bring your vision. We’ll bring it to life.
Thinking About a Kitchen Update?
Visit manslumber.com/products/kitchen to explore what’s possible—or stop into any of the six Southeast Michigan locations and ask for a designer. Bring your Pinterest board, your wish list, or just a feeling you can’t quite put into words yet. Bring your vision, we’ll bring it to life!
