A Merry Christmas Kitchen Tour!

 

You've asked and been patient and today I am going to share the kitchen with you! I really wanted to have the hutch in the kitchen and all set up before I shared but I don't know when that is going to happen, so today is the day for the tour!

I made a video reel for Instagram, but had to use different music for it here.

I also took quite a few photos to share. The kitchen is my favorite room of the addition and Tim's is the garage! LOL!

I made the sugar cookies the other day, and last night our Amish neighbors brought us some cookies they had made!

The area where we have the coffee bar is the 'redneck' corner of the kitchen. Once I have my hutch it will look nicer. I am grateful for it all!

Tonight we are having a dinner party with family friends. I am going to set a pretty table and I'll be sure to get lots of photos.

I love Christmas. Jesus' birth means everything to the world. He came to die to bring us eternal life. His coming was the greatest gift.

There are so many hard things in the world right now, but God is with us, Emmanuel! 

Wonderful!

Counselor!

The Mighty God!

The Ever Lasting Father!

The Prince of Peace!

I pray you know the peace of God. 

Merriest Christmas from my family to yours!

More Kitchen Talk

 

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One thing I'd love to do in my new kitchen is have a free standing kitchen cupboard. 

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I may end up having something like this in the dining area, instead, and keep our dishes and flatware on it, as well as tablecloths, napkins, candlesticks, etc.

For the last 6 months I've had a stack of dinner plates, and our everyday flatware on the table we eat at everyday, as a centerpiece and it's made it so easy and convenient not only to set the table but to have others, like granddaughters, help. 

Having a cupboard like this with all my dishes on it would be so fun. I currently have them on this cabinet.

This is on the living room side of the kitchen door, and I'd love to be able to have this space for the living room.

With the dining area moving to where my current kitchen cabinets are, I'll have room to do a second seating area in the living room, I think.

Anyway, thanks for all your enthusiasm over this project! It makes it fun to be able to share our ideas and plans with you. I'm hoping as the project gets started (after permits are granted etc) to do videos and have regular updates right here on the blog.

In Praise Of Small Houses - Kitchen

 The hardest working room in our home is our kitchen. It is open to the living room, and while that has draw backs, it has allowed us to have a lot of room when we host people.

Here is what our kitchen looked like in the early years of living here. We replaced all the cabinets when we moved in, and bought a new fridge. 

With our big Farmhouse table Tim built, we sometimes had it this way, then I'd change it to the other way.

In 21 years I have made a lot of meals in this house!

One day I finally got the courage to paint my cabinets and have never regretted it!

As you can tell from these photos, I also move things around. I'm always trying to find a good working situation for the way we live in our house at different times. 

The needs we had when we had 6 kids living here, is different than now when we have one kid (he's 17) full time, one kid (she's 20) part time, and my parents living here, too!

We've also replaced all the appliances over the years. And I've changed out my chandelier three times. Once with a $5 yard sale find that I painted black, and the current one I got for $50 on marketplace and used rub n buff and some new crystals to get good sparkle!

Here is my kitchen this morning. Tim's work stuff on the table, fruit drying on the counter. Real life living in my kitchen.

I'm thankful for this space, and if we ever do the addition, and move the kitchen I will be grateful to have a bit more room for living space. And you see the window and cabinets there? That would be where our dining table goes. Lots of thinking, praying, and planning going on here.

Do you live in a small house? What is your favorite room in your house?

A New Kitchen

 If everything goes as planned, and I try to hold plans lightly knowing that I don't control circumstances, I will have a new kitchen when we put the addition on the house.

Because we are zoned R1 we can only have one kitchen, so we are putting the kitchen between our space and my parents space. 

Here is a reminder of the basic layout of the addition we are planning. The doorway into the new kitchen comes from our current kitchen/living room space. The kitchen will have a half wall so that the space is somewhat open to the living/dining space once the addition is built.

I have been pinning kitchen ideas for years and I'd love to share some of them with you from my Pinterest Board.

An important thing to know is that the kitchen will not have any windows. It will have a door to the garage, it will have a pocket door to my parents living room, and it will have the doorway opening and half wall into our dining/living room space. The natural light from my parents living room, and from our dining/living room will be the only natural light in the kitchen.

So, if you look at this photo, the sink will be where the half wall is, and will look out into the dining space. As the wall turns right and you see an upper cupboard, we will have our stove and range hood on that wall. Then the door to my parents living room. We will have a lot of natural light from the half wall.

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I definitely want a range hood. Isn't this one with a shelf cute? I'm done with having the microwave over the stove. We'll put it in a cupboard.

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I really like a country kitchen with a table in it to work at and sit while baking/cooking, and I'd love some cabinets that looked like a nice hutch! I want easy access to the things I use all the time!

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I'm really liking the wood countertops, especially in a white kitchen. I would go a bit darker in the stain, but the wood adds warmth to the kitchen and is very functional.

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Isn't this kitchen pretty? I like the glass front cupboards, and the drawers under them. Bowls ready to use, but also looking pretty, 

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I like this drawer for flatware, but we may have my mom's hutch in the dining area, and I'd want to use it for all of our dishes and flatware, and some glasses, so that setting the table would be easy.

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I really love either drawers or shelves that slide out!

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And I love the way this undersink space is a drawer not a cupboard!

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We'll see how it all comes together but these are my ideas, and I've saved a lot of photos on my board.

What are some of your favorite things in your kitchens, or something you'd love to have in your kitchen?

Home Keeping: Preparing To Paint The Living Room, Kitchen, and Hallway

                    Lindsay gifted this pathos to me.   It's called Pearls and Jade.  Its really pretty.

This week I'm tidying and preparing to be away for Rachel's graduation this weekend, and a potential visit by our bffs Rick and Jane next week.  So I'm doing things like dusting, sweeping stairs, cleaning off counters.

Thinking through what I want to get done before Saturday has me thinking about the Autumn season, and I thought I'd write some of it down here.

One of my main projects for this autumn is to get the living room, kitchen, and hallway painted.  I am thankful that I have such a willing crew of friends to help me get this done.  I used to do all the painting in the house by myself, but its harder for me to go up and down ladders etc, with my back.

I think I'd like this to be a September project so that it's all finished before the holidays.  The first weekend in Saturday is already busy,  but I think the rest of the month is pretty open, so I need to think about everything that needs to be done before we paint. 

The biggest task is to clean the walls, trim and ceiling.  This is especially important in the kitchen.  I'll wait to take curtains down to wash, until we are ready to paint.

I need to prepare a place for the furniture to go while we're painting, though some can just move to the middle of the room.  If the weather is going to be fine, much of it can just move to the driveway.

There is a bit of drywall work to be done before we paint too, some repair work, but my son does that as part of his work skill set so he says he'll do that a week or so before we paint, so we are looking at that around the end of this month.

I need to decide on a paint color, too.  I had been thinking of white, because I'd dearly like to lighten the hallway and I want the color to all be the same in these open spaces.  But, I have white trim and white kitchen cabinets, so I think I'm going to go with an aged gold color and have it mixed at  70% pigmentation.  That way I'll still have warmth of the color, but it will be lighter, but not be lemony or baby yellow.

Any thoughts about this?

Once we are done painting, I need to decide where all the things on the walls are going to go.  Will I put them all back where they are currently?  Switch it all around?  Do something completely different? 

That remains to be seen.  I don't even know yet, but it sure is exciting, don't you think?

Kitchen Cabinet Hardware Update

Remember when I showed you the hardware I bought for my kitchen cabinets?

On Saturday, Tim installed them for me!  Ignore the extra coffee pods box and other clutter.

I also had bought a black wrought iron towel hook, and used the Rub 'n Buff on it.  Tim hung that for me, too!

I only plan to have cute towels here for drying hands or dishes.  No old ragged towels!

 I am so happy to have this project done!  It is not in the budget to remodel my home, but I can do small 'refreshes' (is that a word?) to make it feel updated and fresh!

Here is where I got my hardware, in case you wondered.

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drawer pulls - 

rub 'n buff -

Kitchen Cabinet Hardware

We've lived in our cottage home for 17 years, and when we bought our home we worked on it for several months before moving in.  One thing I didn't want to spend money on was kitchen cabinets, so we thought we'd keep the outdated ones, and just paint them to give them a fresh look.  Well, it turned out that all the lower cabinets were in really bad shape, so we ended up with inexpensive pre-made cabinets.  I painted them a few years ago, and I am happy with them.

What we've never done is put knobs and drawer pulls on the cabinets.  I wanted something different than the basic ones that came with them and over the years, I just never wanted to spend the money it would take to put knobs and pulls on these cabinets. I have 9 drawers, and 15 doors in my kitchen and that's a lot of hardware which equals a lot of money.

Last week, Miss Mustard Seed (Marion Parsons) shared that she changed out the hardware on her desk and share the link to really nice drawer pulls.  I followed her link to Amazon and that lead me to hardware that I liked and fit my budget.

 I purchased a large set of knobs because the small set was not enough for my kitchen and I decided I could use them on my desk and the cabinet in the living room.  They will tie in nicely to the kitchen cabinets since the rooms are really one big open space.

The drawer pulls came a bit darker than the knobs, so I purchased Rub n' Buff in Antique Gold.

It take just a tiny bit to rub on some color and I even did the screw heads.  I think the pulls look more coppery than antique gold, but I like the way they look.  I just may need to use the Rub n' Buff on my knobs, too.

Now to get them hung on the cabinets.  I'll be sure to show you when that is finished!

Below are the links to the items I purchased.  I do not have an affiliate link, so if you want to copy the link and then go through Brenda's widget on her sidebar that'd be great.



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A New Dining Table

It's the end of an era and part of me is sad.  Tim built us a massive (nearly 8ft long!) table 10 years ago.  He used extra wood from our wood floors and we eventually stained it and painted the skirting and legs.

A lot of live was lived with this table.  It was so big that we could have two sewing machines set up and cut fabric at the other end of the table.  When we did a Home Ec class four girls with sewing machines worked at the table at the same time!

We could fit 14 people around this table using benches on the sides and two chairs at each end.  We often did.  Sunday gatherings here, family dinners every night, holiday meals.  

I'm tearing up just thinking about it.

Tim and I have been talking for over a year about getting a smaller table.  The one he made was massive and hard to get around sometimes, especially with a house full of people.  Lindsay and Joseph had bought a nice used dining set, when they got married, and we've always liked it.  With them moving into the apartment at my parents house this past weekend, they were selling it.  We decided to buy it and now it sits in our kitchen.

It's 48" round without a leaf in it.  There are three 12" leaves for the table and we have 6 matching chairs.  Right now we have the table set up with one leaf in it.

It's really great in our space, but with one leaf it looks so SMALL!

It is perfect with my English Country House Style, and we do really like it.  Now I think I need to find a rug for under the table!

Have you ever said goodbye to a beloved piece of furniture?

Lindsay has said that she'd love to have the big table when they buy their own home one day, so Tim took the legs off and stored it down in our shop space in the basement.  So it will go on and more memories will be made with the table.