A TOUR: MY PRETTY LITTLE KITCHEN.........

Just so you know, I'm seriously having a "Shlumpa-dinka" kinda day today....the kind of day where I don't want to wear anything except this ancient old stained hoodie and comfortable yoga pants.........

Not my best look, I know...but it's a Sunday and I haven't been feeling my best lately, and the weather outside is just BLEEECH...not quite snowing, not quite raining.....

HEY MOTHER NATURE: HERE'S AN IDEA FOR YOU! PICK A WEATHER TYPE, AND GO WITH IT, FOR CRYIN' OUT LOUD!

Ahem....here's the view from my front door....it's only 30 degrees outside today. Deceiving, isn't it? I guess I should just be thankful that we're not buried under feet of snow, as we can SO be here in upstate NY this time of year........



So since I'm not going anywhere, and don't plan on cooking much of anything (prolly just a boring chicken and rice casserole for dinner that would make you yawn and vow to never look at my blog ever again), I thought maybe I'd give you a little "tour" of the semi-remodel job we had done on our kitchen last year.

I know, you've seen snippets of my kitchen on this blog for awhile now, but I've never given you the "GRANDE TOUR" of the "palace"...so today's the day, lucky viewer!

Please let me preface all of this by saying that YES, our home is still on the "newish" side, being only 9 years old this summer. So before you go ahead and judge me as crazy or just easily bored (and very spoiled) for redoing a nearly-new perfectly fine kitchen, well, I need to 'splain something.....

Men designed my former kitchen, and I hated it more than words could say. It made me hate cooking, and I'm a girl who loves to cook.

And that's all I'm gonna say, lest I start to sound whiney.

First thing Wink and I did was to decide, along with our builders the fabulous Mike and Roger, to move the existing kitchen sink and counter surrounding it to another wall, thus opening up the space completely. HUGE difference. We also replaced HORRID, HORRID white tile with gorgeous recycled granite countertops. I will never, ever again use white tile, anywhere. Especially when one lives on top of an old swamp and one's house keeps shifting, causing the horrid white tile's grout to crack along the backsplash. Again and again and again.

I almost lost my ever-loving mind over that.

Here's the granite we chose...pretty neutral, and ZERO upkeep....

(yes, it was expensive, but it should last forever...)

So here's a view of the majority of our new kitchen layout, minus the refrigerator wall and door to the back porch....

We saved a lot of money by using our existing cabinets and appliances, which are stainless steel. Our good friend and neighbor Roger is an incredible cabinet maker, and he built us not one, but TWO new pantries to match our old cabinets, thereby substantially increasing our storage. Here's the closed food pantry he designed...

And here it is, open...a little bare right now, as we're getting ready to go out of town...(believe it or not, this cupboard is usually a LOT more cluttery)....

Across the kitchen, there's another pantry to the right of our refrigerator...we use this for cookbooks, pet foods and appliances that I don't want on the countertops...what did I EVER do without this, I want to know??..........

Here's the cabinet we had built around the refrigerator (the door to our back porch is to the left)....LOVE the cookie sheet/muffin tin/cutting board racks Roger built!............

Here's what's next to the stove...funny story about this Boos cutting block that my mom sent for Christmas a few years back. She instructed me (you have to know my mom) to NOT NOT NOT open the cutting board box when the UPS man dropped it off, but instead to wait until Christmas to open it along with her other gifts. I, ever the impatient one, couldn't wait, cut the box open in a hurry and proceeded to drop the 15 pound cutting board right smack on my big toe. I actually BROKE 2 toes and hobbled around for a month, shoeless, because of my foolishness...lesson learned, Mom!........If you look closely, you can still see the blood on the corner of that cutting block...APRIL FOOLS!........

You might notice that we have a lot of fresh fruit lying about....that's to encourage us to actually EAT it!.......

One of the best decisions we made was to under-mount our sink..cost a little bit more, and we had to buy a new sink, but I'm so happy we did, as now it's so easy to sweep crumbs off of the countertops. You might also wonder WHY we didn't have a window knocked in the wall over the sink. That was my decision, as I HATE snow (pitiful, living in the Adirondack mountains, I know..), and really didn't want to stare at it for 6 months of the year while doing dishes. That's my rationale, and I'm sticking to it.....

My mindset is: when somebody buys our house someday, THEY can do whatever they like.

Anyways, I chose to hang this pretty framed picture my mom gave me, 500 years ago....LOVE the woodsy light fixture we picked out to hang above it....

Here's the message center of the kitchen: where I keep my grocery list and any other pieces of paper we have floating about, in a somewhat organized fashion. This is also where our animals are fed, so I have to tidy up this area at least 5 trillion times a day....

Somebody would like a little bowl of cream, me thinks....

Last but not least, we turned our old farm table into an island of sorts, so that I have unlimited workspace when I'm tackling my latest cooking extravaganza (like decorating 75 cupcakes for a party). To do this, we ordered these pretty wood and stainless casters online...these raised the table up to counter height, necessitating new barstools for eating (so funny how expenses snowball when you decide to make a few little changes!)...

Ooops--almost forgot one of my favorite things to show you! Found these new country-french chandelier shades for a song at Lowe's, and added lots of twigs and a bird's nest from the forest outside, just to add a little more woodsy-ness to our home....



So, now you've seen where all the "magic" happens in our home (ha ha ha, besides the master bedroom, that is! Get your mind out of the gutter--sheesh!).

I have to say that I LOVE cooking in our new kitchen now.  This is the 4th home Wink and I have owned in our married life...in that time, I've cooked in BIG kitchens, TINY kitchens, but this one here in the Adirondacks, on the medium side, feels just right!

Thank you so much Mike Risley and Roger Parent!

Thanks so much for stopping by!

Leslie

(P.S. if you'd like this home for your very own, it IS for sale, you know...you can check out our website, through Coldwell Banker, HERE. If you decide to make an offer, I will gladly throw in a few cats....)