My kitchen (well mostly about my kitchen) (Part 2)

My hats off to you if you waded your way through my last post. I promise that this one will be shorter, and as a bonus, will have pictures.

Just to update you so that you know what my whole house, not just my kitchen is like now . . .

In my last post I forgot to say that our house is not post and beam. It is not architecturally pleasing. When we built it it was just a plain gray box with white trim and a red door. That about says it all. Three years ago we put on a small front addition. It consists of a porch with a barrel (curved) roof and two columns. There is also an indoor entry way with the same roof. That addition solved two problems. The first is the plain front of our box house is no longer flat and boring. The second problem was that when you walked in our front door there was a wall about six feet in front of you. I never thought that that was very welcoming. But now it's wonderful.

The other changes to our house are not structural, but rather rearranging of rooms. In my last post I said that the office became the kids' playroom. After that Geoff moved a wall in the pantry making the pantry larger and the dining room smaller - each by about 3 feet. All of a sudden it was difficult getting around the dining room table. So we moved the kids into the smaller room (former dining room, even more former Vicky's bedroom). The dining room (former playroom, even more former office and originally our bedroom) carpet was horrible from the kids doing all of their crafts in there so we ripped it out and painted the plywood (not ideal, but as you will see later in this post, my house is a series of unfinished projects). An antique oriental rug is over the plywood.

When we put in the front entryway addition we removed the wall with the door between the original entryway and the then kids' playroom. That was how it was supposed to be before we realized, 16 years ago, that the room would be a nursery. I hated the room being open and full of the kids' junk so when we moved the business out of the basement we moved the kids downstairs and turned the former playroom/dining room/nursery into a tv room.

And that's what my house looks like now. If you want to see what we want it to look like, please look at the drawing at the top of my post (I couldn't figure out how to get it down here, can someone help me?).

First some explanations. No matter how often Geoff and I told the architect that the room was a dining room not a "Study" he kept forgetting to change it. The space that says "Dining" is really the eat-in kitchen. The untitled room next between the pantry and the stairs is the tv room. Our original (existing) house ends at the back of the bathroom and dining room. Everything behind that is the addition.

So now that you have information overload I can explain why our kitchen currently looks the way it does (How many inches of text has it taken for me to get to this?) Basically our decorating life has been put on hold until we figure out if we will ever be able to afford the addition. For example, I'll start with our stove situation. As I said yesterday, we currently have a 16 year old 30" stove with two functioning burners and an oven door that has a tendency to fall off its hinges. You may be wondering why we don't just go out and buy a new one. The reason is simple - because what we would buy for the "new kitchen" doesn't fit in the existing kitchen. Instead of a 30" stove in the addition we want to have a 36" range top (4 burners and grill) and a built-in oven (maybe double ovens). Geoff is getting old (as he's constantly reminding me) and it is getting difficult for him to bend to get things out of the current oven (as he's constantly reminding me). That's pretty much the story for the rest of my kitchen. I can't put in a new floor to cover the plywood and the central vacuum hole because we'll just have to undo it when (if) we put on the addition. We can't redo the cabinets because they won't work in the new kitchen. You get the idea.

We are getting to the point where we realize that we will probably have to reduce the addition in order to be able to afford it (much like we had to do with our house). These area the things that we want from an addition:

- Windows to see outside without having to walk right up to the window.

- Higher ceilings so we can have a larger Christmas tree (Ignore the fact that I'm Jewish)

- A brick oven because Geoff loves making bread

- Wall oven(s) to save Geoff's back

- Book shelves to display our vast collection of cookbooks.

- Display space for all of my serving pieces (see post from a few days ago)

If any of you are architecturally minded and can figure out a way for us to do that in less space please let me know. I'd forever be grateful.

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