*Nearly finished* the kitchen remodel

    I can't believe almost a month has gone by since my last post! Phase 1 of the remodel wrapped up days before we were leaving for vacation so we uncovered the floors to appreciate them the day before we left, and I am so glad we did, because when we got home, seeing it all with fresh eyes, it was stunning. 

Ta-da! The nearly finished kitchen!

   What's left that wasn't in Phase 1? The focal wall behind the range! Our plan is to do a tile backsplash up to 20" from the countertop, and have the tile end in a giant, full-length wooden shelf supported with brass L-brackets, then about 12-14" of space, and another full-length shelf. This is why the sconce lights are mounted so high. My goal for the shelves is to have some functional things on the first shelf like drinking glasses and salt and pepper grinders and measuring cups, etc., and then framed artwork and plants and collected pieces that I just want to display on the higher shelf, which are being lighted by the "stage lights," as Rye calls them. 

I know, it looks silly for now, but when it's done, it will be very cool.

   While the countertop is gorgeous and the pendant lights are style points, it's the personal pieces on this wall that are really going to make the room complete and homey--the room where new guests will enter and think "this is SO Josh and Carrie!" 

   Back to the backsplash. During the last week of work for Phase 1, I took the kids on a scouting out trip for tile to Floor & Decor in Parkville (though one should be opening in Owings Mills later this month). I LOVED the store! So many tiles, on displays and in stock, right in boxes right in front of you (that I could even reach!) so you could peek inside and see what they really look like. I took pictures of about 6 different tiles before my kids had had enough and wanted to go home, but I knew Josh would love it, so I figured we'd be back. And then the week after vacation, the four of us went back (taking gaming systems for the kids and sticking them on a bench in a patio scene) while Josh and I finished looking at the tile aisles (that's fun to say). We agreed on one pretty soon--a 4" by 16" honed marble with hints of dark blue, gray, and a few sandy-colored ones. 

"Aleutian Isles" Honed Marble

   We pored through the boxes, choosing our favorites and re-boxing them in groups of 10 (until a super nice employee told us we aren't really allowed to do that but that she was going to walk in the other direction and mind her own business), and we went home with 45 tiles, more than a little more than we theoretically need (because you never know if they'll crack badly when you make cuts), but you can return them too so it didn't seem like a big deal. We brought them home and compared them to the countertops, and while they aren't matchy-matchy, they don't feel like they are competing with each other, nor is either taking the back seat to the other. But we'll see how it looks when they're actually up there! 

   And as for the shelves, we found a planing mill about an hour away that should be able to make them easily and at a good price. We were waiting for the office cabinets to go in first, then we'll call and have the shelves and desktop made at the same time. 

   Enough future talk, I'll pose the question that everyone has been asking--do I love it??? There aren't enough exclamation points in the world to emphasize how much I love it! It's open and airy, fancy yet comfortable, spacious but not unnecessarily so, and is allowing us to flow through the kitchen so much better! Is it perfect? Probably not, but I think we did the best with the floorplan space that we had (compared to having a room that would be a little wider) and if I have to take a few extra steps to walk from the oven to the silverware drawer 10 feet away, I don't care. Little things like that can also be solved with organization. I'll bring some tasting spoons over to the kitchen utensil drawer instead of the silverware drawer only. My tall vinegar bottles don't fit in the pantry drawers or pullout next to the fridge-- but next time I will buy a brand with a shorter bottle, ha! And the island's end shelves that I planned to use for potatoes, onions and maybe spices still look very disorganized, but I'll work on that. Maybe I'll move the spices once the shelves are up, or decide to move the potatoes and onions to the pantry cabinet. Organization is not a one-time thing. Sometimes you find the right place for an item through trial and error. 

I was planning to get matching baskets to use here.

   Another thing I'm not so sure of--the hutch. I bought this beauty at the end of last summer from Facebook Marketplace, and I really wanted to incorporate it into the kitchen design. I had even considered going with a warm brown wood stain to sort of match it, but then went totally different with this light-colored Wicker stain on Maple. We very recently moved the hutch to the kitchen, in the spot we specifically designed for the hutch, and I'm not sure how I feel about it. The color really stands out. And compared to the floor-to-ceiling pantry cabinets, it looks miniature! Also, the stain had some rough patches that I tried doing all the easy fixes for (Howard's Restor A Finish is pretty amazing) but now that it's in my brand-new looking kitchen, the imperfections stand out a little too much. I think if I keep it, I will remove the drawers and bottom doors and refinish them fully so my eyes aren't constantly drawn to the imperfections. 

Cat included for scale. 

I love the clean lines, but not sure it fits.

Something I AM loving though is having my dishes in drawers instead of overhead cabinets!

Drawers > cabinet doors > upper cabinets

   I'm still not fully unpacked. We have WAY more coffee mugs than we need and I'm waiting to see how many I will want to put on the shelves, then I will probably be thinning the collection out. I still have a whole box labeled "infrequently used kitchen drawer items" that I don't want to deal with yet (but I did open it to get my cookie scoops out to make oatmeal chocolate chip cookies!). I had been putting off bringing our vitamin bin up from the basement because I didn't know where to put them in the new kitchen (one of those weird items that you want to keep handy but also don't want to look at), but then we remembered there's a sort of secret cabinet in the island that we hadn't even placed any shelves in yet because we hadn't had a need to. Perfect for vitamins! 

   It still feels a little weird to have people over to show them "how I spent my summer vacation," but then again, it feels so good to have the space available again to do what we love--cook and host! 

   It will probably be at least a month before the shelves are ready, so I will not be updating again for a while, but when it's done, I will!

   Oh, I did post some pictures on the app Houzz on a string about Wicker Maple cabinets, because there really aren't any pictures out there and I was one of a handful of people seeking them back in the spring, and already two people have commented back that they are going with the Wicker Maple after seeing how ours turned out. Yay! So glad I could help them out! 

Floors, paint, countertops and hardware: a major transformation took place!

    Whoa, what a two weeks we had! Immediately following the last post about how the cabinets were getting installed, we had my niece and nephew stay with us for "Cousin Camp" week. My kids and two of my sister-in-law's kids of similar ages go to Creative Arts Camp at LifePoint Church and the cousins stay with us through the week because they live an hour away and it makes the week just that much more special. The cousins had seen the old kitchen ripped out, but they got a taste of what it was like to live out of the kitchen-dining room-living room all-in-one basement for a week. I think they were more ready than usual to go back home by the end of the week! (And I was ready to be done with so many dishes!)

   During Cousin Camp week, the hardwood floors were going in. Starting at the interior kitchen wall, the floor expanded toward the back of the house, then toward the front of the house until it reached the front of the center hall, though not for the last 4 feet of the front of the house because that's where some appliances had been sitting and were getting in the way. The great room was done next, and as of this writing, the office/laundry room and front of the house still need to be finished, but that is on the books for this week. The kids got a kick out of coming home and seeing how much had changed from day to day.

The new wood floors! Most are still covered in
cardboard though, so they weren't harmed during
painting or any of the other work going on.

   Last week, post-Cousin Camp, I came down with a long illness, so I spent most of the week in bed. The flooring was put on hold because the painters were available, and since the painting was holding up the electrician, this became the priority. (It was also MUCH quieter than flooring going in, and my pounding head was grateful!) The decision to hire painters was a bit of a tough one. I completely respect that house painting is a true skill, but I would also give myself a B to B+ as a painter. But considering every single wall had received some level of spackle, and I wanted all of the trim and doors to be switched from the almond color to a pure white, I knew it would take me a few months of weekends to get all that painting done, with many days of kids telling me they are bored and want to do something or go somewhere and I would have had to either disappoint them or be disappointed in my progress. So, when we were recommended a reliable painting company and were told that they could do the job--the entire first floor--in 3 days, we went for it. 

   The crew of 3 men worked from 8 a.m. to 4-5 p.m. for three days, then one guy came by himself on the 4th day just to do the last few little things before he and the rest of the company all took their vacations the next week. The amount of work they got done each day was amazing, and the quality is impeccable. We have these brand new floors that I was agonizing about getting paint on them, but through the week I only saw one big drip, which was removed the next day before I brought it up to them. The new quarter-round trim installed at the edge of the molding and the wood floor needed to be painted, and those lines are so crisp--there is no way I could have achieved that! I am so relieved that it is done!

   So, the colors. The Alabaster looks just as good as I wanted it to. The Upwards in the great room, however, is taking some getting used to. Picking my colors in a rush, I saw this color on the 2- by 3-inch card, associated the color with a pleasant memory, and approved it. But once it started going up on the walls--bordered by the super white new ceiling and the pale gray of existing paint, the color looked a lot bolder than it had on that little card. "It's totally baby boy nursery," Josh said. The new paint kind of glowed against the old paint. 

First glimpse at the new Upwards color

   But then we noticed the tone really changed with the different angles of light and different exposures throughout the day. In direct sun, it looked gray with a hint of blue.

Direct sun in the afternoon

   On the north facing wall in the afternoon, it looked sort of purply gray. 

Same time of day as above, but doesn't that look crazily different?

   On the west wall, it looks kind of baby blue. It's not what we expected, but I must say overall it is very pleasing (Rye disagrees). It does seem to be more of a bedroom color than a great room color, but we're not changing it now! Plus that room doesn't have any lights in it right now, so we'll get a new side of it with the 3000K LED lightbulbs very soon! Plus furniture and wall hangings and all the other things that make a room feel cozy rather than looking like an empty, colored box. 

Alabaster in the kitchen, Upward finished beyond

   The third major thing that happened last week is that the countertops went in! As I wrote in the post about picking out the slab, Josh and I like a bold piece of granite, and when we finally found this one, my heart was aflutter. We had even used painters tape at the warehouse to determine what part of the slab would look best on the island and where the sink should go, but when the slab got to the fabricators' warehouse, the tape had been removed. The week that the company was coming to measure our cabinets and develop the template for the countertop pieces, I emailed the customer service rep our photo of the taped out layout, and she said that was very helpful and she would go with it! So here is what that picture looked like and the template photo imposed on the slab that we got back from her before the stone was cut:

   It was very close to what Josh and I had designed, so I approved it with no further suggestions or hesitations. Then on Thursday of this week--in the early parts of the Tropical Storm Debby rain--the installers arrived with the countertop pieces loaded on the back of a pickup truck(!). They did a few last minute measurements, then the two men brought the pieces in, one by one: first the little cabinet behind the sink, then the piece to the left of the oven, then the piece to the right of the oven, and finally the island. I don't know how much that 39- by 122-inch slab weighed, but it was painful to watch just two of them pick it up off the wheelie cart and lay it on the island cabinets. I could tell Josh wanted to jump in and help, but it's one of those situations where the professionals know what they're doing and you have to trust it in their hands. They slid the slab a little to the back, then measured the edge. They slid it a little to the right and measured again--bingo! Next came the undermount affixing of the workstation sink, then the drilling through for the main faucet and our RO faucet. (We are sooooo looking forward to getting our water filtration system back up and running!) Josh and I inspected the granite and it seems great, no chips or cracks or fault lines. 

   On Friday night the kids and I had our first meal at the island:

Upon seeing the installed countertops for the first
time, Knox said, "do we get to live here?" Josh ate
with us the next night but I forgot to get a picture.

   I am just as in love with this granite as I was when I first saw it. I was extremely tempted to start moving all our kitchen supplies and food upstairs and into the drawers and cabinets, but considering we only have one working outlet and no running water yet, I held off. Those two things will be taken care of this week and then I'll get my chance to do the big move/organization (even if the floors and trim aren't done in all the rooms yet, haha). 

   One last thing, the knobs and pulls got installed on Friday, and I'm loving them too. This is "champagne bronze," and it's reading almost coppery right now without the overhead lights, but we love copper too, so I think it is beautiful and really compliments the softness of the wood stain. 

"Champagne bronze wishes and caviar dreams"

   In another week, I think the cardboard boxes will be removed, the official lights will be installed, and the kitchen will be totally in use. The last thing hanging out there is to pick the tile to go over the blank wall above the oven and get the shelves that will sit on that wall made. Since that might take another few weeks, I'll post one more time once we move back in and then again when it's totally done. Dishwasher and oven, get ready, I've missed you! 

Starting to look like a kitchen!

    After the walls were smooth, we could get the cabinets installed! Clearly, this is one of the most exciting steps, but it is also a slooooow one. Half a day went into just getting the cabinetry that will surround the fridge just right. The pantry was also a multi-day process. But then came the island, which magically got set in place in less than a day and then officially installed the next day. This was the moment I was sort of holding my breath over--would all the little squares of space on my graph paper add up to enough actual floor space for traversing around both sides of the island???

For the record, 45" of space on the seating side of an island works!

   We brought a barstool up from the basement, set it at a realistic location on the seating-side of the island, and Josh practiced walking behind me when I was hunched forward and when I was sitting leaning back. Great news, it was plenty of space! The next step was checking the sink side of the island. Would the dishwasher door being open allow someone to pass behind it or open the pantry door that it will back up to? We didn't want to get the dishwasher out of the box yet, so we tried using a measuring tape and it seemed good but maybe not great. This led Josh on a tailspin of "maybe we should rethink where you were planning to put plate storage" and a long explanation of why he suddenly, hypothetically, didn't like my designated spot. I bit my tongue and told him we can try my way and if we don't like it, then we can try it somewhere else. This conversation went on for what felt like an hour. Not going to lie: I was way more internally stressed about his suggestion than I wanted to be, but seeing how both sides were still just based on a gut feeling of what would work or not work, it felt like a moot point at this time. We tabled the issue. 

   If you read my earlier post about picking cabinets, you know that I really had a tough time narrowing it down. Well I am happy to say I LOVE the way the cabinet stain turned out! We still don't have the right light bulbs in (except for one) to see the correct color temperature, but whether it's natural light in the day time or the temporary lighting up at night, I LOVE them! The real lights can't be installed until we paint... which means we needed to pick paint colors. 

   I've had other blog posts from our old house about how much thought and time I put into paint selection, but now that we're eight weeks into the renovation, I wasn't willing to take my usual time with this decision. As soon as the first cabinets went in, I went by Sherwin Williams and picked up about 10 shades of white and put them on a large white posterboard so I could have a clean slate to compare them to, rather than the purplish brown of the old paint. I hung this under the one keeper lightbulb in the kitchen. Immediately a few were ruled out as being too gray, too green, too yellow, too peachy (I actually loved the peachy one, but not for a whole first floor). I brought Knox in because he really has a good eye, and he agreed with the ones I had ruled out. I ended up liking SW Creamy, and he preferred SW Downy as his first choice, so we brought Josh in. Well Josh ended up preferring the greenish whites, which was a no-go for me. But then he asked, "what about Alabaster?" Alabaster was one of the two whites we used in the last house during my big 2020 "Say No to Gray" painting campaign, and I had really liked it. The next day I went back to Sherwin Williams, grabbed the sample chip (3 minutes before the store closed--the poor employee was so relieved to see I knew exactly what I was looking for), and when I got home, I put it on the posterboard and instantly made up my mind that I could choose this color again without overthinking it. The last step was me thinking about a light blue I had seen in one of the SW palette books, I think it was "mindful" or "restful" or something like that. The color is SW Upward, and it reminds me of a very faint blue that our George Street apartment had been painted by a previous tenant/friend, a color that made the apartment feel homey instead of bland or corporate. I love blues, and have a tendency to go too bright with my color choices, but this is a case where a gray undertone keeps it from being a baby boy nursery color. I showed the chip to Josh and he instantly liked it too (perhaps subconsciously also remembering our old apartment blue) and we decided to use it in the great room, to make that room feel a little extra special and cozy. 

   So now the cabinets are in place but not all the doors are on. The countertop company came and measured the actual space and is working on the templates, which I was promised I would get to see mocked up on a photo of the granite slab before it is cut, and I believe the turnaround on the granite fabrication process is about a week. That means I potentially *could* have a functioning kitchen in a week to week and a half!!! I feel like I've been pretty patient throughout this process (praise God, I really have been content through these two months of living in the basement, and patience does not come naturally to me!), but seeing my kitchen finally LOOK like a kitchen, I'm getting itchy to have it finished! Not that I want to rush the end, because I know these last steps are all the ones you're going to be looking at and you don't want mistakes. It's just I now linger in the kitchen, looking out that new slider, and want to put my seltzer can on a counter but have to settle for putting it in the top drawer of an open-face cabinet. I cooked a big batch of meat on the grill and brought it inside, wanting to set it down on the island to cool before I put it in the fridge, but had to put it on a trivet on the floor instead. It was quite comical. 

   It's all coming together, and it will be finished when it's finished, and I will enjoy it in all it's fullness then!

   In the meantime, here's the nearly-finished pantry 😍

I swooned the first time I saw this installed.                 
When I look at it, The Cure song "Friday, I'm in Love"
plays in my head.                                                           

Smooth sailing with smooth ceilings

   The part of the renovation that we were least looking forward to (living through) was drywall. Josh has many childhood memories of his dad spackling and sanding, spackling and sanding, and the mess it made and the irritation it brought to the family. But if you're going to move walls, there will be new drywall, and new seams to be spackled, and you must accept that there will be drywall dust. 

   Drywall dust was already lightly covering the first floor, but the biggest storm of dust was sure to make the early dust feel like a joke: we decided to un-popcorn the ceilings. And not just in the kitchen, where we were going to have to patch the ceilings pretty significantly anyway, but the whole first floor. Why would we put ourselves through this potential blizzard of dust while living in the house? Because it was now or never, and having just the kitchen have smooth ceilings would make the other areas feel shabby and probably make us regret that we hadn't done it. So we went for it!

The old ceiling texture and some the first swipes 
of smoothing out the ceilings.                              

   Thankfully, we had a recommendation for a professional drywaller, Richard, who told us he could get the job done in five days with minimal dust, thanks to his vacuum sander and 50 years of experience. We thought this was a little boastful, but really liked that he had so much experience (and reminded me of my uncles) and arranged to use him. 

   Rye let us know from the early planning stages of the renovation that he is allergic to drywall dust and did not want to be here for the drywall stage. Getting the kids out of the house so they wouldn't be tracking first-floor dust to the other two levels was a great idea, and much thanks to their grandparents and my sister-in-law, we arranged for them to visit family for four nights/five days. 

   We prepared the house by stapling a tarp to block off the steps to the second floor and taping around the entrance to the basement and resolving not to use that door for the week, but instead to use the outside door to enter the basement. So this means when we got up in the morning and went downstairs to get a cup of coffee (before Richard and his helper got here at 7:30 a.m.), we had to go down the second floor stairs, through the tarp, out to the garage to get the creamer, out the front door, around the back of the house, and in the basement's back door to the coffee maker. At night, this meant carrying a high-powered flashlight with us as we went out the back, around the side yard, up the deck steps and into the kitchen where we had left a single lightbulb glowing. It felt silly and funny, and like one of those short memory bursts you think you'll never forget because it is so unusual and so ordinary at the same time. 

   The other major downside for the week was the inability to run the air conditioning. Not that Richard was restricting us from using the air conditioning, but all that dust would have gotten sucked up and spit out throughout the house, making it ten times worse. I thought I would be able to convince Josh to let us use it on the days that weren't major sanding days, but he felt pretty strongly about protecting our already-not-so-great HVAC system. So during that week of mid-90s temperatures in mid-July, we lived in a warm and humid basement by day and had all our windows and balcony door open with high-powered fans blowing some circulation in at night. It was unpleasant for sure, but not disgusting. One evening around 8:30, Josh asked me for a walk and I made a face that said, "are you crazy?!?" His response was, "you're not going to feel any hotter than you do now," which turned out to be true, because when the sun goes down and you're in the park there's a nice, cool humidity and a dusky pink sky that really is very refreshing. 

   Richard truly was amazing. He finished by 2 p.m. every day, and finished on Thursday instead of Friday. He would chat a little but also let you (COUGH *Josh*) know it was time to get to work. The day when he sanded the popcorn ceilings was not any dustier than any other day--I only noticed they had been done because I looked up! 

Smooth ceilings everywhere!

   Getting the drywall and ceilings done gave me a total boost of energy toward the project, and made me a little antsy to see the next big stages take place: priming/painting walls, cabinet installation, and eventually, countertops! Popcorn detail is less than a quarter of an inch in depth, and yet our ceilings now feel 4" taller, and all that white makes the house look so crisp. Totally worth a week of sweltering heat and more dust/mess on the floors that are going to be replaced!

The left side is what the floors looked like when Richard
was done, and then how they looked after I wiped them 
down with a wet rag so I could walk barefoot again.       

 

A month and a half of progress in the kitchen

    I can't believe a month and a half of work has already gone by! We moved our first-floor furniture to the basement and upstairs in early June and then demo began. Not wild and crazy demo with a pack of contractors in matching shirts and crow bars like they do on HGTV, but really just removing parts bit by bit as the old was in the way and needed to make room for the new. The carpet with gross stains in the dining room is STILL in place, with about a dozen new stains, but it won't come out until the popcorn ceiling above is ground down and smoothed over. 

   We've gone through two major renovations before, so we know there are work weeks with behind-the-scene things that go slowly and weeks with really visible stuff that makes the transformation feel like it's flying by. We've had a little bit of both so far, to the point that the kids are starting to ask, "Is it almost over?" The foundation for the future kitchen is completely laid, but drywall patching and repair is just starting now, so I'm guessing we're at the one-third done point. 

First floor transformation

Looking in from the great room to the main house

   Because the kitchen is now at ground zero level, my refrigerator and oven are sitting in the dining room, just waiting. We're utilizing the "bonus fridge" in the garage, and a combination of hot plate, toaster oven, Instant Pot, griddle and grill for cooking. Cooking (and choosing WHAT to cook) has been a little challenging but not bad. In the beginning I was doing grilled foil packets, like sausage and peppers, chicken caprese, even a gnocchi and corn packet with a white wine sauce that would have probably have been really good if I hadn't run out of propane in the middle of cooking it. We've had a lot of burgers. We've had some quesadillas using the indoor griddle. We tend to order pizza once a week. We're eating more salad than usual as our side though, so that's a good thing! I've learned that I can't run another appliance with the microwave or hot plate at the same time in our basement. I've learned that our new microwave is super powerful and not to use the automatic reheat button because the kids will have to wait 10 minutes for their food to cool down. I've learned to shop light at the grocery store and plan just three days out at a time because we don't have that much fridge space, and then the kids are forced to eat leftovers because it's all we have (win/win!). There are extra steps to food prep (figuratively and literally, as I have to go upstairs to the garage fridge at least dozen times a day), but it hasn't been bad. 

   Our basement also has a utility sink, which has made doing dishes a breeze (not a cool, refreshing breeze, more like a hot and humid breeze that is still better than no movement at all). The kids do their own dishes half the time (depending on whether we're there and catch them before they slip away). Knox told a friend's mom that he's getting over his "spongeaphobia." We have only used paper plates once so far, when we had family over for an impromptu dinner and got takeout pizza and the restaurant threw the plates in as a courtesy! 

   Living in the basement with all that extra furniture hasn't been that weird either. We have a large TV area with two full-size couches and a love seat and the great room's entertainment center; the kids' cubbies toy storage got moved around and greatly reduced to what they actually still play with (sort of); and the dining room table became the temporary countertop holding our daily-used appliances. The breakfast table, which was Josh's grandmother's kitchen table, sits against a wall and seats three, and we pull it away from the wall when all four of us are home want to sit together for a meal or a board game. We also have full walkout French doors with a picnic table on the patio and our glass table and chair set on the deck above. The kids usually fight us on eating outside because of the occasional (but non-confrontational) wasp that comes by, but Josh and I use these outdoor areas as much as we can.

Temporary kitchen in basement

   I would say the hardest part is getting used to all the noise. The cats are similarly pretty terrified of construction sounds (I hate the Sawzall, too, Sweetie Pie!) so we take them upstairs to the master bedroom before work begins each day. Most of their days are spent sleeping under my bed, unless the windows are open, in which case they sleep on the coffee table by the front window. The bonus for the cats though is that we are in the basement with them in the afternoons and evenings when work is done, and they love it. You know, in their cat way, where they don't really interact more with us but they look 20 percent happier even though they are just sleeping. 

   A cousin who went through a kitchen remodel a few years ago asked if I was getting decision fatigue, but since I took my time with the kitchen and dining room decisions over a period of about six months, there haven't been too many decisions to be made. And when there is something I don't care about, like where to reposition a floor vent for the HVAC, I let them know I don't care and to do what they think is best. Now that we've designated the area that is going to be the office, we've started making decisions about what the desk and cabinet space will be like, and we are making these decisions faster and perhaps with less hand-wringing, but that's kind of refreshing. 

Future office being carved out of the breakfast nook!

   The timing has felt so easy and right, that I don't feel like the project is moving too fast or too slow. God's timing has been such a gift: the out-of-stock floor we had our hearts set on came back in stock on a night I happened to be looking at Home Depot's website for something else; the floors were delivered on a day I was home and had cleaned the garage out early even though we had put the delivery date on hold; the day we wanted to put in the sliding door was sunny and breezy and the perfect day to have windows open and a gaping hole in our wall. There have been little hold-ups here and there, but I am full of praises and not complaints! Living in our temporary all-in-one basement has been easier than the packing up and moving stage, so let that be an encouragement to you if you have a renovation project you have wanted to do but were too worried about the mess and complications of living through a renovation! 

   

From the Kitchen File: Picking out the little things

     My last post was about choosing the three major finishes of a kitchen: cabinets, countertops and floors. It was a big relief to have those settled, but there were still other choices to be made. 

    One major factor in setting the feel of a kitchen is lighting. Our house is an early 90s house and the lighting situation was pretty dim (pun intended). The kitchen had a ceiling fan with 4 lights that looked original to the house, and the last owners had updated the breakfast nook and dining room with two insufficient pendant lights. The great room had another 90s ceiling fan, and the front living room had nothing, though I believe the former owners had swagged a light over to the center of the ceiling, but they took it with them. It just feels really dark for a house that has a good amount of windows. Also, the ceiling is textured, not with the popcorn/cottage cheese look, but a sort of fireworks-like pattern that I didn't mind too much but drives Josh crazy. So, since recessed lights are going in and will be making a lot of holes in the ceiling, and the portion of the ceiling where the wall is coming down has to be patched in anyway, we're getting all the ceilings on the first floor smoothed. The new lights and a smooth surface are going to make a BIG difference in the feel of these spaces.

    Choosing decorative lighting is hard (if you are picky). Much like hardwood floors, stores carry a pretty small sample of hardwired lights in the store, but if you get on the internet, there are ENDLESS choices and styles. And if you are like me, you will find something you really like, only to find out that a single pendant is $775, which is outrageous, and your plan calls for four pendants. 

Not kidding--this 9.5"-wide pendant cost $775!

We have a 10-foot island, and most kitchen experts would recommend then having two very large pendants or three medium-sized pendants over that length. That works great if you have tall ceilings, but we're working with regular old 8-foot ceilings, so while I'm drawn to those giant woven-basket style pendants, in our house they would be ridiculously oversized, blocking views and bumping foreheads. 

Interesting light fixtures. Kind of a weird kitchen.

    I decided to go for four small-but-not-mini pendants (9 to 10 inches wide) because then I can have one centered over the sink. Having one a foot off-center from the sink would bother me, and the point IS for them to be functional, not just decorative, and I'm starting from scratch with light placement so I can make symmetry and centeredness happen. I have been looking at pendant lights since December and now pretty much all of my Facebook ads are for lighting, which I appreciate because they really would see what vein I was going in and show me more similar things. But before I chose my pendant lights though, I stumbled across these pretty cool gallery lights at the incredibly affordable price (comparatively) of $99 for the large and $69 for the small at World Market. 

Gallery lights are meant to light up a picture directly below them. 

    I'm not sure if I saw gallery lights being used in a kitchen while I was doing my kitchen research of if it started when I was looking at built-in offices, but once I decided I want to go with some open shelving over the stove wall, the idea of gallery lights over the top shelf (to highlight art and plants and collective pieces) got me excited. I showed them to Josh and he was thinking about it, and then by the time I was ready to order them that weekend, World Market was quickly selling out. I thought I was going to get one large delivered from the website and two larges and one small at the store in Rockville because the internet had sold out. But they had oversold at the store and my order was canceled, so I started searching World Market locations all over the East Coast (and Knoxville, TN where a favorite cousin lives!) and a store in White Marsh that hadn't even opened yet, and it looked like I was out of luck. But then three days later, I checked the website again and the three I needed from Rockville were suddenly available (perhaps someone else had never picked up their order?) so I reordered them and took the kids to Rockville two days later to pick them up. I am very excited about them and hope they will look as awesome lit up as I am picturing them in my head! 

Gallery light from a 
customer's review.   

    Back to pendants. I revisited the question of what is the theme of my house--and the answer is "comfortable retreat." If I'm using a cool toned-sort of neutral wood for the cabinets and what I would call a kind of glam granite countertop, and I have these barstools that remind me of a comfortable clubhouse sort of look, then what sort of light fits, or as they say in The Big Lebowski, "really ties the room together?" I wanted something kind of vintage, so I ordered these two first:

The beachy light fixture. It was actually ice blue, not crisp white. 

The mercury glass light.

    The mercury glass light in person was not nearly as cool as the website. The paint was layered on too many times and it just looked dirty (I washed the glass to confirm that it wasn't just dirty). I was even able to hook it up to a plug-in pendant wire I had and see what it looked like lit, and I kept trying to like it but just didn't. The white one was actually sort of ice blue with hand-applied brown stripes that looked like they would match our wood tones well. I thought it had a sort of beachy vibe without being too beachy, but Josh didn't think it fit with the glam-factor of the countertops, and I agreed. I did more searching for pendants and showed four to Josh, and we decided to order two and see how we liked those:

The champagne parasol light fixture

The lotus light fixture

    We actually liked both, but considering the low ceilings and that the pendants would be hung kind of high, we didn't think you would get to see/appreciate the texture on the top of the lotus flower one very well, and while the parasol one wasn't magical, it felt like a solid, non-show-stealing selection that looked vintage, clean and had brass accents that would work with the gallery lights. Plus they were a steal at $63 on Amazon. Take that, ridiculous $775 pendant! 

    That leaves the chandelier for the dining room. I don't know why so many chandeliers are circular when most tables are rectangular. Our table is six feet long without a leaf, but we normally have a leaf in, making it seven feet long. A 24-inch diameter circle doesn't do much for the ends of the table. I kept searching rectangular chandeliers, but most of these are a "caged" style, where it literally looks like you are locking up your lights in a cage. (I know this sounds ridiculous; I am reminded of the Maggie Gyllenhaal in the movie Away We Go where she is a mother who refuses to use a stroller because "I love my babies, why would I want to PUSH them away from me?" That cracks me up every time I think of it.) Caged chandeliers are just not a look I like. 

      This looks like you are telling light bulbs to stay in their place.                              

    I did find this one that is linear and kind of Nordic, a style I like but don't really want to embody in this house, and I liked that it was 51" long but it also feels a little stark to me. 

Swedish, but not IKEAish.

    A lot of round chandeliers are either modern or too traditional, so I also started looking at boho styles. I've ordered this one, which Josh was not very pleased with the look of it on the internet but we'll see when we get it in person:

This sold out on three different websites at the same time. 
I'm hoping it lives up to its hype. 

    And I also like this one, but it's sort of small, I think I would want to get two of them and hang them over the table:

I call this one the "rattan asterisk."

Besides lighting, another decision was the kitchen sink. Our kitchen had a large stainless steel sink in a 36-inch cabinet. However, it was a divided sink, with a lot of wasted space between the two chambers, and it was quite shallow. I could fit most pots in it, but not my baking half sheets (let alone my full sheet, which spanned across both basins!), and we were always spilling water on the floor. Josh always says doing the dishes is his only contribution to the kitchen, so he was quite interested in what sink we would get. (Side note: while most of the kitchen design was to my specifications, I did let him have the win when it comes to putting the sink in the island even though I don't like this plan because then all your drying dishes are taking up island space and I hate having to dry things with a towel because evaporation is a thing that requires no human effort. Josh likes the sink in the island because then he can talk to people while doing dishes. So we compromised, and I'm putting the sink in the island and I will leave dishes for him to do while I sit in the bar stools and watch. If anyone wants to get us a housewarming gift, buy us dish towels that actually absorb water, because we will be needing them!) When we were at the kitchen supply store, a gigantic Kraus workstation sink caught our eye, and the staff said people love them. This is a very rectangular sink with a ledge on the long sides that perfectly holds a cutting board, a foldable drying mat, you can get a basket strainer that fits, and probably even more I don't know about yet. I quickly made note of the model they recommended, saved it on our Amazon list, then had second thoughts about it when the price went up in the spring and researched other brands and read reviews for all the companies, got nervous because there are negative reviews for EVERY brand, then saw the Kraus sink went back down in price and decided to get it. Even better, there was one on Amazon that was "used like new" for 35% off. I don't usually buy "used" things on Amazon, but it seemed pretty clear to me that this was a sink that had been opened and returned without being used, so we bought it! We opened it up and it looks fine except a little bit of not-straightness in the undermount part of the metal, which seems like it will be fine. So that decision is done!

Behold, the super functional workstation sink.

    We still need to pick out a faucet, but that feels like less of a big deal. People keep asking what type of metal our cabinet pulls will be and I'm thinking champagne bronze but I want to see the cabinets first. And I won't have to wait for much longer, they are coming in next week! 

Cabinets, countertops and floors, oh my!

    My last post about the kitchen was in March, which feels like way more than two months ago. During my writing break, we took a family Spring Break to Savannah; I started teaching fifth grade grammar and writing at the kids’ school; and I even picked up third grade math for the last few weeks before summer break! It was kind of a whirlwind. I am so glad I picked up the grammar and writing class because it was Rye’s class and I get a kick out of his cohort, but all the prep and grading was very challenging. Hats off to people who teach five days a week and still manage to get everything else done! I taught two days a week and it was kicking my butt. My family would have to turn to foraging for food if I worked full time. All this kitchen remodel would be in vain. Speaking of kitchen remodel...
I have spent a lot of space writing about the function of the kitchen, because that absolutely needs to come first when planning a remodel. But now I can tell you about the form, and the three big details: cabinets, countertops and flooring!
It’s the least exciting, but I knew we had to choose our flooring first because it's the foundation and will be visible in every room. It must be able to both stand on its own (as a likeable floor) and play well with the cabinets. Our house has half wood floors and half carpet on the first floor. The carpet came with some nasty stains so it had to go anyway, and while I would have liked to just match the existing wood floors, it turns out they have already been sanded and restained once, so if we put new floor boards down beside it, we would have to sand them down as if it was on its second refinishing as well, which ends up being a big mess and a lot of time and cost we were counseled just to start fresh. 
   At the old house we had original heart pine floors stained in red chestnut, which was a nice reddish brown color…that we did not want to repeat. After all, if this house is going to be our “comfortable retreat” we want it to feel light and airy, including the floors. If Josh had his way, he would choose a pickled white wood floor (he’s a big fan of Architectural Digest and there’s a lot of that in those circles) but I feel like that look is too sterile (and all dirt would show). I could agree to light colored, but still tan. I even liked some of the rich medium-brown wood floors, but Josh vetoed that, and I ended up deciding that didn’t fit my design keywords anyway. 
  We were interested in both solid hardwoods and engineered hardwoods because we had installed engineered in the basement at the old house and were pretty happy with it. I visited the local hardwood flooring shop in town every now and then, trying to narrow down what I was looking for, but nothing felt right. The big box stores ended up being pretty terrible for research. They would have a full aisle or more for vinyl that looks like wood, and then four to eight samples of actual wood flooring. I would even stop at big box stores in more populated areas like Cockeysville and King of Prussia in hopes that they would have a larger assortment in stock, but they didn’t. This meant we had to resort to ordering 5-by-7-inch samples for $5 a piece online, then picking favorites and ordering full-sized boxes of them so you could see the variety of tones within a box to decide if you really did like it.

I'm pretty sure we had more, but we
might have gotten rid of some that I
ruled out right away. 

We ended up ordering 6 full-size boxes of floors (first four at one time and then two more later), and would lay the boards around the dining room and our bedroom to see if they grew on us. It was pretty discouraging, because of the 20 or so samples we collected, only two of them really looked like their internet picture. The boxes did end up looking like the samples, but there was no unboxing that led to a celebratory “I’ve found the one!” moment. 

   But, with patience, we found one that we kind of liked, and opened the whole box and spread it out in our bedroom (because of the great natural light in there), and over time decided “I still kind of like this one.” Neither of us got what we wanted individually, but it definitely scored the greatest combined ranking from the two of us (sorry kids, your votes meant nothing to us) and it was a very reasonable price to boot. Plus, once I started thinking about the countertops and lighting, I realized you don’t want the floor to be the jaw-dropper. The floor should be background – save the starry eyes for the more-at-eye-level details! 
   Before we committed to the floor, we were bringing home samples of kitchen cabinets to compare against our floor. I had originally thought I wanted a rich brown cabinet, medium dark but you could still see the wood grain through, so we brought home door samples in chocolate cherry, chocolate maple, and cognac maple.

This hutch is going in the future kitchen, and
was taken into consideration when choosing a stain.

We were allowed to keep these samples for 6 months because “nobody really chooses brown wood cabinets anymore.” I am not one to be swayed by trends for the sake of trends, but it was still not a nice thing to hear. So I kept the doors laying by the wood floor samples and kept thinking about it. And then I realized these too would not be “light and airy.” So I looked at the Kraftmaid website again and this time noticed “wicker,” which is a new stain that debuted last year and that our cabinet company hadn’t had in their sample display. I emailed Emily, our kitchen designer/orderer, to ask about it, and she confirmed they did not have a sample yet but she would order it for me right away. A few weeks later, I picked up the wicker maple drawer front and wicker cherry drawer front and immediately loved them both. Sorry, brown wood tones, you were out. But then I still couldn’t choose which one of the wickers to choose. 

Wicker maple on the left, wicker cherry on the right.
Our chosen floor below!

   My gut said the wicker maple was too yellow. Josh said the wicker cherry was too pink, and that LED lights would make them look even pinker. We both could see each other’s point. Josh conceded I could pick the one I wanted, and I waffled back and forth a few times.* Some people we showed the samples to thought they were too close to the floor color, but I find that very peaceful. And again, it is going to let the countertop (and maybe tile backsplash) be the focal point. We took both samples with us when we went granite shopping so we could hold them both up to the slabs. 

  Granite is by far the most exciting part of the kitchen process! Well, it is if you like exciting kinds of granite. We LOVED the granite in our old kitchen, but we didn’t want to pick the same thing again. Our cabinet store is also a countertop fabricator, and we had looked at their samples during our first meeting with Emily. We found two that we liked:

Viscont White Extra Dark reminded us
of our beloved George Street's granite.

Blue Dune had a lot of movement, but this
slab was much more sand-colored while most
of them online had actual blue in them.

  However, much like the flooring choices, these particular slabs did not lead to a “Say Yes to the Dress” joyous moment like I was looking for. So we went to visit the granite suppliers they work with to see if we could find The One. We started with Bramati in Frederick (as my birthday daytrip!) because that’s where we found the George Street granite and we had had a good experience with them our last time around. The staff there is very friendly, and while they aren’t allowed to talk price with you if you are using a separate fabricator, the elderly gentleman manager assured me that the things I liked were average to below average in cost. We kind of did go gaga over this slab of stone:

In my fantasy, Fantasy Brown would not be
so susceptible to chipping and stains. 

only to be heart broken when we learned it is Fantasy Brown, which is kind of a muddy term for a stone that is between granite and marble. We loved this one because the brown striations reminded us of a weathered old tree, and the white parts were a really nice shade of creamy white that was not yellowy. I did a ton of research and people reported more good experiences than bad experiences with their Fantasy Brown cabinets, but many of them recommended getting it in leather texture rather than polished, that way when chips or etching happened it would be less noticeable. We really prefer the polished look, and I know that if the counters got chipped around the sink (where I wash my big cast iron skillet and ridiculously heavy pizza steel), it would bother me. We sighed and moved on. 
   I did more specific scoping of the other suppliers’ websites and saved photos and wrote down names of specific varieties we wanted to see in person. However, when we visited our second location, Gramaco in Laurel, it turned out that the one we fell in love with was one I hadn’t even noticed on the website. We had the workers bring the forklift over to see some Blue Dune, which we weren’t very taken with, but then Josh asked to see the Monte Cristo that was behind it:

Behold, Monte Cristo!

In the movie version of this kitchen remodel, the warehouse ceiling would split open, a light would shine down from heaven on this slab, angels would play their trumpets and I would have wept at the beauty of this slab. THIS was my “Say Yes to the Dress” moment! Pictures don’t quite capture it, but it is blue and gray and creamy and what looks like big brown spots are actually GOLD patches. It has a lot of “movement,” which is what they call it when the pattern is not very uniform, and it has mountain peaks and ocean waves and it is a giant piece of nature mined for my domestic enjoyment. I was ready to sign on the spot, but the company told us they were getting some more slabs from the same lot delivered in a week or two, and Josh wanted to see those before we committed to this one. Gramaco gives you a week to place a hold on the stone before you have to get it under contract, but they extended it an extra week for us so we could come back to see the new slabs. Seeing the other slabs, we actually did really like one of them, but it had a little ripple of uneveness to the surface, which may have been nothing, but that I feared could have been a potential future crack or fracture. Josh agreed, so we went back over our original piece again, measuring it, searching for any other signs of cracks or chips, and only found one finger print-sized chip on the very edge that could easily be cut off. We got out our painters tape and started laying out which part we would want to be the island countertop, where the sink cutout would be, and which parts to use for the rest of the counters, and even measured it for radiation with a homemade Geiger counter that we borrowed from my friend Dylan. I think our sales rep Isabelle thought we were super cute and/or super neurotic, and she took a picture of us, added some words to it, and PRINTED IT OUT FOR US then and there as a souvenir of our day. She contacted the cabinet company and the papers were drawn up for the contract the next day. 

As Josh said, "When you bring your own
Geiger counter, they know you're special!"

  So, after loosely holding the three big elements in balance as we made sure they all would (should?) look good together, we now are under contract on the countertops, have ordered our cabinets in wicker maple (they should take 4-5 weeks) and are waiting for our flooring choice to come back in stock so we can order that in the next few weeks, and if it doesn’t come in stock, it is available in another width that we can go with and still get the same look. 
   My plans for the renovation start were originally pinned on early April, were pushed back to late April, and eventually postponed to the first week of June, but it all feels like it’s coming together as it should be. A week ago I started packing up the office furniture that lives in our dining room and living room, now that the school year has come to a close, and I’ve even gone through the kitchen drawers of non-essentials and packed things like wooden skewers, plastic utensils brought home from Chick-Fil-A, cloth napkins, etc. I sold my antique table that served as my desk because we won’t have room for it during the remodel, nor a good place for it post-remodel. There’s still SO MUCH to do before demo starts, but chipping away at a box or two a day is pretty much the way to do it. There’s no use getting the move to the basement done early if the steps that will follow it aren’t going to be ready! Friends are lined up to help us move furniture June 2, and Lord willing, the crowbar and sledgehammer will come out on June 3! 

*A footnote on indecision: I sat on choosing between these two cabinets for over a month. I'm a pretty decisive person, but I could not make up my mind. My friends kept telling me "whatever you choose is going to be great," but in the back of my mind, I had the Eminem song "Lose Yourself" playing the background, because the opportunity to design your own kitchen usually DOES come "once in a lifetime," and here I was blessed enough to be doing it for a second (and probably last) time! The stain color is so new that Kraftmaid doesn't even have any pictures of kitchens designed in it with maple or cherry, only oak, and I'm not a fan of the grain of oak on cabinets. I found one woman on Houzz who said she had ordered wicker maple for her spring kitchen remodel, and I reached out to her through Houzz and possibly Instagram (not sure they were the same Britt V) to ask for follow up on how she liked it, but she never got back to me. So I had to make the decision based on a 12-by-8-inch drawer front sample. Really hoping I love it, and if not, that I quickly learn to love it!