kitchen…

When we looked at the house originally I thought the kitchen was decent, if a little dated.  It’s WAY bigger than what we had in VA, lots of cabinets, a full size dishwasher, a gorgeous french door refrigerator (that sadly they wouldn’t let us keep :( ), built in microwave, an island… It wasn’t until I started trying to put stuff away that I realized how incredibly cheap and dumb it all was.

Here’s most of it on move in day (that’s our realtor cooing over the baby).
The rest of it, including our eat-in kitchen for which our table is too big but we knew that when we bought the place so eh, no biggie.

Ok but why do I think it’s dumb.

First off, there are exactly 10 drawers.  I had 5 in my tiny kitchen in VA.  Drawers are super handy for keeping things corralled so you better believe that I don’t think there are enough of them.  Oh and the widest one is, oh about 10-11” max and oh they’re all about 3” deep also super helpful.  Awesome. 

Second, the cabinets all have doors that don’t meet together in the middle which means that there is a strip of wood between every set of doors which makes them rather awkward.  And they are ALSO super narrow.  I couldn’t get our dinner plates in the ones by the stove and they just fit in the ones on the other wall.  The lower cabinets are just big open caverns with a shallow shelf at the back.  Again super handy.

Third, that little desk like nook up there in the second picture.  Looks great.  Actually has the widest drawer in the kitchen.  Too bad that it’s about AN INCH AND A HALF deep.  Yep doesn’t fit any of our desk supplies.  Hence it’s nickname – the stupid drawer.

Here’s a few pictures if it’s various levels of disaster over the last few weeks.

After the movers unloaded.

After we sorta started unpacking.  It looked like this until after Liz had been here for several days and made me deal with it.  So it was a few weeks like this.

See…. so much better now, right? Friends who can make you do stuff that you don’t want to are the best :)  Well, when it’s stuff that you should be doing, of course.

 
This is what it looks like right now.  I’ve mentioned the on-going shuffle action of stuff around the house, right?

As for our plans…

Long term:
- all new cabinets (with way more drawer space)
- a gas stove (induction is for the birds)
- double wall oven
- a new built-in microwave (the one we have doesn’t even have a turn table in it)
- new sink (the black Microban is just kind of weird)
- butcher block countertops from IKEA
But that’s probably going to be several years down the road.

More immediate plans:
- paint the cabinets
- add cabinet hardware
- replace light fixtures over the non-existent table and the sink
- replace dishwasher (that’s a story for another post.  ick is all I will say for now)
- get a table to go with our existing chairs
- paint the walls and trim
- remove hideous country curtains
- refresh the panels in the main light fixture (they look burned or stained)