I love the time change in the fall. Will and I have been needing an extra hour in the day, and this weekend we got it! We were amazed at everything we had accomplished by 10:00 Sunday morning - would that every weekend was like that!
Now on to the kitchen... as you can see, the kitchen in our new house was in sad disrepair, with broken appliances, chipped tile, paint the color of dirty dishwater, mold under the sink, and smelly cabinets. Since Will is a kitchen designer by trade, he couldn't live with a kitchen like that and so we began remodeling before we even moved in. Lucky for me, eh? The escrow papers had barely been signed before he was in there with a sledge hammer, ripping up tile and the whole wall behind the sink. That was horrible - there were even a couple of dead rats back there. Not any longer, though - all mouse holes have been filled. The kitchen is small - sort of a U-shape with one end open to a breakfast nook on the right and the family room straight ahead. There wasn't any room to reconfigure or add cabinets (except on top of the existing uppers where we'll be adding small 12" high cabinets with glass doors), so he took off all the doors and drawers and kept the basic framework. We primed and painted the interiors of the cabinets white - partly to help get rid of the smell, and partly to brighten them up. The new doors and drawer fronts will be white. Then we had to make a hundred decisions for every other detail - easy for Will but requiring a lot of thought from me... What style doors did I want? Did I want a double sink or a large single one? I chose double. Did I want both sides equal, or one larger? And which side should be larger? And which side should the garbage disposal be on? Goodness gracious. Then I had to choose a faucet, and a second little faucet for the filtered water that would be coming up from underneath the sink. We had to choose new appliances. Then there was the issue of the countertop.
Our first choice was black granite, but the granite guy talked us out of it because he said it would show every fingerprint, water drop and crumb, so instead we went with quartz in a deep black/green. That's installed now and I love it! I have yet to decide on the wall color (I'm thinking white), and the wall color for the nook (a shade of green), and the cabinet hardware. Here's a close-up of that sink which required such thought...
The kitchen is by no means finished, but at least it's working now. I went nearly a week without any water in there, with food and dishes in boxes in the dining room, and Will's tools all over the place. The doors will be ordered tomorrow, but will they be in place before Thanksgiving when 12 people will be here for dinner? hmmmm....