Blue by Monday

It’s time to tackle room number two in our (slow-moving) Beigeland-no-more painting extravaganza. We’re giving Xander’s room a blue boost. Picking colors is, for me, such a seat-of-my-pants, random experience. It usually works out, but not always. Wish us luck.

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Finis (finally)

Okay, take a second and go remind yourself where this all began.

Shudder.

After twelve relatively stress-free weeks of construction with a fantastic design and contracting team, it was time to move into the new kitchen and start using it. It felt wrong somehow to use that perfect, clean, brand-new kitchen for the first time — but I got right over that.

First Michael moved the appliances into place:

Then I went straight out to our tiny garden and picked our first harvest of green beans.

First use of the sink.

First use of the stove.

Next we unpacked our cookbooks and gardening books.

Then it was time to load up those new cabinets with pots, pans, dishes, and dry goods.

It’s never fun to pack up a kitchen, but it’s always a blast unpacking and figuring out where to put things. Or is that just me?

That night, I discovered one more favorite thing in the new design: undercounter lighting. We found we didn’t use the overhead lights nearly as much (and when we did, we used the dimmer to lower them), but we loved the glow the undercounter gave to the space at night.

And here’s how our kitchen looked three years later, lived in and comfy and holding up perfectly:

Need I say it yet again? Man, I miss that kitchen.

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Tile

For years I saw (and loved) subway tile everywhere I looked. Magazines, movies, houses I wrote about for a local magazine.

I wanted to see (and love) it in my house.

I came home early one evening, and there it was! Chris even stayed late that day to get the job done.

The tile was the last big project in the new kitchen. All that was left were the cabinet pulls and knobs, finishing touches I thought of as the jewelry of the new space. The end was so close. I couldn’t wait to put books on the straight, strong bookshelves, spices in the gently gliding drawers, and glasses in the sparkling new cabinets.

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A few of my favorite things

We felt really strongly about just a few design details of the kitchen remodel; the rest we left to our talented kitchen designer.

We (well, I — Michael didn’t care as much about this feature initially) wanted a big, powerful, stainless steel range hood. Years of wimpy ventilation systems demanded it.

This one was a beauty. And brawny. It was perfect.

We also wanted — nay, needed — the biggest, deepest sink we could find. No double sink for me, please. I just don’t understand the appeal; they make it incredibly difficult to wash larger pans, bowls, and dishes.

Oh how I loved that sink. It was always — always — the first thing people commented on when they saw the kitchen for the first time.

We chose a faucet that made sense for the time period the house was built.

To that end, we also chose light fixtures that could have been found in the house in 1924. These classic schoolhouse-style fixtures came from Rejuvenation, and were one of my favorite things to search for.That place is a veritable candy store for people interested in period remodeling.

In the end, we loved the new kitchen as a whole — it was efficient and beautiful. But it was the small details that Michael and I researched and chose together that made it feel like our new kitchen, completely unique to us.

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