Dear Old Kitchen....I Miss You

Warning: This post is full of "first world problems" and content that may or may not bring about feelings of annoyance or rage at me. 

Y'all know I'm super excited about our new house and feel very, very lucky to be here. However, every now and then I do find myself missing our old kitchen.

Photo by Galina Coada.

It's hilarious really, because I literally barely know how to boil water, but there are a handful of things I find myself missing about this space on a regular basis. And I'm not talking about the pretty, I'm talking about real life functional things, like....

A double trash pullout IN the kitchen. 

I realize it may seem a little weird to lead with a trash can (or two) but seriously I never realized what a luxury this was until I didn't have it anymore. I had two 50 quart trash cans that pulled out from behind a cabinet, completely within reach at all times.  Now I have one large trash can around the corner in the walk-in pantry. It is literally ridiculous how annoying and inconvenient it is to have to leave the kitchen to throw trash away. It is equally as annoying and inconvenient to have to take out the trash what feels like constantly. With two trash cans (one regular and one recycling) it took awhile for the bins to fill up. Over here at the new house the trash always seems to be full.

A touch Faucet

Photo from my Instagram page.

I've talked before about my love for my touch faucet, but I don't think I realized how used to it I became. I can not tell you guys how many times I have smacked my faucet over here at the new house to get it to come on. Of course it doesn't, I stare at it dumb-founded and then I remember.

Soft-Close hinges and guides on my cabinet doors and drawers:

I literally feel like such a diva writing this, but once you experience cabinet doors and drawers that do not slam no matter how hard you shut them it is (apparently) really hard to go back. I, like so many people lived with "normal" cabinets my whole life, but after working at Bell Kitchen & Bath Studios (custom cabinet makers) and having those custom cabinets in my own house for almost 3 years I somehow lost the ability to shut doors and drawer gently. 

Oh woe is me, I know, but to be honest it is really helpful knowing what bells and whistles I actually care about and which ones are nice to have in theory, but mean very little to our day-to-day life. As I said in my "Meet Our New House Post" this house has really good bones and while we want to put our own personal stamp all over it, there is nothing that just has to be done. We definitely want to redo the kitchen. What? I can't help myself, it's what I dooooooo. But, with the baby coming in a matter of WEEKS (ahhh) and all of the other craziness surrounding us with the move, work, etc.. we have no immediate plans to begin any renovation of that magnitude. However, we certainly talk about it, scheme about it, draw it and think about it often and in a way it's nice to have this time to really consider what we want to do. If you remember, with our last kitchen remodel we had to dream it up and execute it all before we moved in. This worked perfectly fine then and we were both happy with the finished product, but it's nice to have some time to marinate on all of the decisions and really consider what worked for us the first time around and what didn't, so we can make this next kitchen even better than our last.

Unless otherwise noted all photos are my own. 

Sunroom Turned Home Office Reveal

Y'all, I love our home office. Like really, really love it.  And that feels really good to say after having worked on it off and on for over a year!!  I know you guys are ready for a little less talk and a little more SHOW ME THE DANG ROOM ALREADY!!! So, without further adieu, let me show you around...

HERE SHE IS!

This is the view of the space from the living room. A little spurt of happy, eh? 

We had Bell Kitchen & Bath Studios (the company I work for) make custom cabinetry for the office. Because we really needed this space to be equal parts functional and pretty, we spent a lot of time brainstorming ways to make this cabinetry provide AS much organizational and functional opportunities as possible. 

We only have one full depth drawer in the space, so we designed dividers to custom fit inside the drawer so everything kept inside would have it's own little nook. In general items are more likely to find their way back to their home after use if they actually have a designated home to come back to. Write that down, it's a fact!

Underneath this drawer we have a cabinet with a printer pullout installed. 

We love this feature because it keeps the printer off the countertop, but easily accessible when we are ready to use.

We incorporated two knee spaces along the wall so Brent and I would each have our own area.Two cabinets were installed between us to help differentiate the two spaces. In the first cabinet we have two file drawers.

This drawer makes me feel like such an adult.  I mean, I actually know where my 2012 tax returns are. It's like HELLLO Courtney you organized devil.

To keep the look cohesive we had the front of the cabinet next to the files look the same as the filing cabinets, but it actually functions as a double trash pullout. Obviously we don't generate that much trash in the office so we replaced the back bin with the shredder.

As we were planning this office Brent  had one specific request. He wanted the desk to lift up to serve as a standing desk should he want to work that way. Standing desks are popular right now as it is supposed to be really good for you to stand during the day as opposed to sitting hour after hour. To make Brent's dreams come true we divided the wood countertop into two sections, one for each of us, and had special lift mechanisms (Brent actually found them on-line) installed under each top. The desks sit at normal desk height most of the time, but on the occasion that either of us decide we want to stand, we simply un-hinge the top, pull up and poof... the standing desk comes to life. Our respective sides have their own lift mechanisms so when one of us stands or sits it doesn't necessarily mean we both have to.

 Here Brent is utilizing the feature last week during one of his calls...

Since moving in to this house we have tackled a lot of projects and made a lot of improvements, but this space is definitely one of my top three transformations. Being organized and productive never felt so good! 

Resources: Cabinets | Chairs | Lighting | Floors | Ceiling | Cabinet Hardware | Curtains | 

All photos are my own. 

Meet My Kitchen - Part 1

So...My house. Remember that project? Yeah, a  LOT has happened since I last updated you. In the midst of final wedding details, the actual wedding, the Luxury Living Show Kitchen and the two weeks in Italy for my honeymoon, the house has be-bopped along and a whole lot of progress has been made. It's officially a home. Not a dust pit, not a construction zone, but a home, our home.

With that being said I am WAY behind on updating you all and if I put all of the updates in one post you may be reading for a few days straight and that just can't be good for your eyes. So, I'm going to break it up a little, starting with the kitchen. WARNING: even within the kitchen itself there are many layers of progress, so this will definitely be My Kitchen part 1.  I could go to part 10, but I'll try to consolidate and hold back my long winded tendencies.

Last time we talked about the kitchen it looked something like this...

It stayed like this for weeks while we worked on other parts of the house and tweaked this space preparing it for it's new cabinetry. We had to paint, add some electrical, slightly rearrange the plumbing, add a gas line for the new range and have some HVAC work done to relocate a floor vent and prepare for the hood that would vent to the outside. You may also remember the addition of the picture frame moulding in the dining room that Brent installed in this post, it too was part of this prep stage for operation new kitchen. All of these tweaks and modifications were necessary, but other than the addition of the moulding and the painting not too much pizazz was added to the space during this period of renovation. So, while we were making progress, it didn't really feel like it, because there was a whole lotta work with no added pretty. It was more like added dust and backaches and then some more dust.

Finally after much sweat, dust and tears (Brent gets really emotional when he is able to successfully wire a new outlet) we found ourselves at the eve of our cabinet installation. We FINALLY got to take up the plastic that had been covering our newly refinished floors and the kitchen looked like this the night before the big install.

As some of you know I'm a designer at Bell Kitchen & Bath Studios and we make custom cabinets. And Thank God we do, because as you can see, and as I have said before this kitchen is small. Of course removing the wall between the dining room and kitchen as well as closing off the random door to the outside significantly increased the opportunity for functionality and really opened up the space, but still the space is small and the design had to be carefully considered (obsessed over) to ensure we made every bit of the space as functional as possible. We schemed and tweaked and literally thought through every single cabinet determining what would be stored inside. I will post a whole cabinet innards post at some point, but for now just know no cabinet in our kitchen just happened. It happened because we deemed it worthy or necessary to take up precious real estate in our small space.

It was D-day. The install team rolled up and got to work.

Our cabinets are from Bell's Studio frameless collection. The cabinets are maple and painted Benjamin Moore's White Dove, OC-17. We painted the walls the same color except for the under the chair rail which we painted Sherwin William's Caviar, SW6990. The existing crown molding was removed and replaced with new crown molding around the cabinets and into the dining room so everything was the same and there was no weird transition.

 

The kitchen and the dining room are now divided by a peninsula that houses the microwave, trash/recycling, cutlery divider and a few rollouts on the front side and a hidden cabinet on the back. 

Love the happy little corbels. 

By the end of the day...POOF - the beginnings of a kitchen! Stay tuned, the countertops were templated a few days later, more on that soon!

All photos are my own.