You Never Know.

Mr. Rogers was an ordained minister, and that is something that inspired his career a lot.  I've read most of his books and most of the books written about him because he is a great hero of mine.

In one of his books he talks about his training learning to be a minister.  He and a friend had drove several hours to see a very renowned and famous minister give a sermon.  When he arrived, he was bitterly disappointed to learn that the minister was out of town and they had what-you-call-a-substitute minister.

He and his friend sat through the dry, boring minister.  He thought the sermon was terrible, and towards the end of the sermon he turned to the lady next to him to make a snarky comment about the quality of the sermon.  When he turned and looked at her, he saw she was so moved by the sermon that she was sitting in her pew bawling.

The Kitchen is Actually Happening!

After tons and tons of planning and talking and goal setting, the kitchen is actually becoming a reality.

It got a major jump start one night at Menards.  We were looking at hardware, backsplash, and paint ideas whe we saw the mistint section.  They had a green mistint, two gallons of it, for $5 each.

We had already decided that green was the color we wanted our walls, and I figured one green was as good as another, and that price was certainly right, so we bought both gallons and came home.

Before I even had a chance to steel myself for the excitement of painting, Jason was off and running with the painting:

And I thought, boy, that is not at all what I thought that was going to look like!  But, because I am scared of my own shadow, I didn't dare say anything to him.  He kept painting:

And asked me what I thought:

And I said, "I like it!  It looks good!  You're doing a great job!"

He finished this section of wall and stood back:

And he said, "You like it?"

And I said, "Yeah!"

Then I took a deep breath, gathered my nerve and said, "But do you think maybe its a little too green?"  "Or maybe it might look Christmas-y?"

And he said, "Hmm...I don't know.  What do you think?"

And I said, "What if... I hated it?"

And he said, "You don't like it?"

And I shook me head.  No.  I don't like it."

And he said, "Good.  I hate it."

And I said, "I hate it too."

So the next day we went back to the paint store.  Several paint stores: Mendards, Wal-Mart, Lowes, and Home Depot.  And I looked online.  And I grabbed what seemed like thousands of paint samples.  And they are looked SO different next to each other. 

I spent hours and hours holding paint samples up to the "inspiration kitchen colors."  After all of this, I determined that the colors on our laptop must be off. 

Finally I picked Glidden's "Spanish Olive" for the color, but we went to Home Depot and had them color match that with Behr Premium Paint, because Jason said it was the best and I believe him. 

Cats and Neighbors

As many of you know, my neighbors have nicely asked me to keep our cats inside.  This is a really big challenge because before we got our cats they were indoor/outdoor cats, and based on their behaviors since we've adopted them I am guessing they were mostly outdoor cats.  They are very motivated to go outside, much more motivated than I am to bother to keep them in.  And they are excellent escape artists.

Its a perfect storm.  I don't care about them enough to keep them inside, they are determined to go outside, and our neighbors hate them going outside.  I don't blame them for hating the cats either.  They are a retired couple who has invested a lot of time, money, and energy into a beautiful garden so they can sit on their patio and watch the birds come to the sanctuary they have created for them.  They don't want my cats scaring off the birds.  And I can appreciate that.  But not enough to do battle with the cats all day every day.

Today Jason opened the door to take something outside and both cats bolted through the door.  My hands were full of screaming, hungry baby and Jason was busy and stressed out.  Not in any shape to deal with the screaming, hungry baby that had a deathgrip on her milk source.  So neither of us were inclined to go hunting down the two cats and gave up on getting them back inside.

I nurse my screaming cherub until she is calm enough to go outside.  Then we head out armed with gardening gloves and a kneeling pad to clean the leaves out of the flower bed.  We are out there ten minutes of so, wading through the goopy guck and worms, and I look over at my neighbor's gorgeous yard. 

While looking over, I noticed my neighbor lady is sitting on her porch.  Or she was.  When I look over, she has a book and she is violently throwing it over and over again at the glass window of her porch.

As I've said before, they are an older couple and very sweet.  I am always afraid they will get sick and die and drug dealers will buy their house, corrupt my children, and drive down the property value of our house.  So I consider myself very invested in making sure they haven't devopled dementia, alzheimers, or have gone crazy. 

So I stood up, watching her repeatedly, violently throwing this book at her window.  I said to the baby, "What on Earth is she doing?" 

Once I stood up, I could see that she was looking at the ground.  I also looked at the ground and saw the fatter, dumber of my cats, Yoshimi, was on the ground hissing at my neighbor's cat on the other side of the window. 

I groaned, knowing this was going to be embarassing. 

Carrying the baby on one hip, I came over into my neighbor's yard and tried calling the cat.  Which looked at  me and laid down.  I talked to her very softly, moving slowly so I wouldn't scare her.  Once I got close enough, I grabbed her and threw her on my other hip.  Of course she started hissing and clawing me trying to get away.  I had to hold her a little further from me so she wouldn't claw the baby at the same time. 

I think the neighbor lady was a little embarassed I'd seen her throwing a book at the window, so she yelled to me, "They were having a confrontation!"  (Through the glass, where no one could have been hurt).  I said, I know, I'm really sorry.  We are really trying to keep them inside."

Then I carried the yowling, clawing mass of black fur into the house, acting as a barrier between the baby and the cat.  I got to the door and I yelled to Jason to come open the door.  He arrived, terribly put out that he had been interrupted to open a door.  I told him we need to fix the screens on the porch to keep the cats in.  I will let you know what happens.

 

Betty on Mad Men

OMG BETTY LOOKS HUGE!  I don't believe in judging women for their looks, but thats all she's got going for her!

Teething

Poor Ceci is teething.  This means she is in pain, cries a lot, and wants to be held constantly.  You can imagine what my house looks like.

Confession

Since Jason works from home, all day long her chases me around bugging me to rub his head and scratch his back.  Which I refuse to do because I don't like to encourage begging.  But once he falls asleep I rub his head and scratch his back for awhile.

The Plan for our Kitchen--Use of Space

The Storage

Our kitchen is a busy place and some days I am in it from the time we get up until the time we got to bed, leaving only to change diapers and use the bathroom. So, getting this room organized well was a top priority when we moved in since it affects my life more than any other part of the house.

Even though our kitchen is a pretty good size, the space was not being used very well:

  The kitchen felt like it was overflowing with kitchen gadgets:

There was no space to do any prep work:

The kitchen was used for several purposes that all were not being accommodated for:

All of this made it impractical to eat in the kitchen nook because I often found myself resorting to using the space in the nook to stash kitchen stuff and prepare food there:

So, by the time food was actually prepared we tended to eat in the living room just so we had somewhere to sit down to eat:

*Picture not available because the living room isn't much cleaner than the kitchen*

First we took stock of what we wanted to use the kitchen for:

*Baking and cooking

*Making coffee, teas and toast

*Storing dishes, pots, pans, lids, cutlery, Tupperware, coffee cups, dry goods, etc.

*Eating 

*Storing fresh herbs in our greenhouse that had been stored on the porch all winter due to lack of space

*Kenneling our dogs

*Providing water for the two cats and two dogs

*Providing a safe place for the baby to play while we cook

*Looking good/showing off our cool kitchen stuff

Although we identified what we needed our kitchen to do, I am not a spatial person so I really struggled with how to store all of this. 

Making coffee, teas and toast.  Eating.  Baking and cooking.

I knew I needed to clear off the counters so I had somewhere to prep for cooking and baking and so I could have the nook free to eat at.  I also knew in the nook area I wanted easy access to the coffee maker, toaster, kettle and tea cups.  We talked about installing a shelf above the nook to keep the baby away from the dangerous hot temperatures of these items, but couldn't figure out how to make that work without disrupting the seating area.  Finally one night when I couldn't sleep I grabbed the table the toaster oven was on, and slid it over to the wall next to the nook.  I moved the appliances onto the table and put the toaster oven where the appliances had been.  This worked well because it helped hide the recycle and compost bins that were on that wall, the appliances on the table were tall and fit on the table better, and the toaster oven took a lot less counter space. 

Storing dishes, pots, pans, lids, cutlery, Tupperware, coffee cups, dry goods, etc.  Storing fresh herbs in our greenhouse that had been stored on the porch all winter due to lack of space.

I knew if I could move the extra shelf out of the kitchen, that would give me a space to bring in our greenhouse so I could grow the fresh herb I'd wanted to have in the kitchen for years.  I wanted to move one of the two storage shelves downstairs to the guest room to store the baby stuff until I get knocked up again, but needed a better way to store the pans that were on that shelf and I knew I wanted some kind of pan rack. 

We looked online at pan racks and saw they were hella expensive.  Also, most of them didn't hold enough pans.  The racks that hung from the ceiling were impractical with our low ceilings, and we couldn't find anywhere to hang them from the ceiling that they wouldn't be in the way.  A friend of ours hung his pans on his wall, which we really liked that but weren't sure how to do that in our kitchen. 

We went to Menards and tried looking for a towel rack to use S-hooks to hang the pans on.   We couldn't find a towel rack that looked like it could look "right" as a pan rack, so I thought maybe we could hang pans off of those wirey shelves you normally use in a closet.  Jason was not super on board with this, but he humored me.  We looked at the wire shelves, then went to the hooks. 

We could not find a hook that would hook onto the wire shelf and hold our pans.  My obvious choice was a "S" hook, but the "S"s that were wide enough were too fat.  The "S"s that were thin enough were too narrow.  Then we saw the pegboard hooks.

Now, to be fair, Jason had suggested using pegboard in the kitchen months ago, but I had envisioned pegboard that looked like the brown, crumbley, unpainted stuff hanging in our garage.  I had adamantly vetoed this and insisted it would look stupid.  However, the pegboard hooks were the exact size I wanted to hang the pans and I was feel desperate that we would never find anything.  Then I saw the coolest pegboard I'd ever seen:

It was diamond!  And I was desperate.  So I thought, "What the hell, Jason might be right."  So we got the biggest piece of diamond pegboard they sold and brought it home.  We didn't know how it would look, but we figured if we hated it we could either take it back or use it for storage in the garage.    

We hadn't put the final coat of paint on the walls yet, but we hung it up when we first got home just to see how it would look.  And it looked SO good.  And I trial-hung some pans on it, and it was amazing how well it worked.  I was totally stoked! 

And I was convinced my husband was the smartest man in the world.  I searched Pinterest to see if anyone else was as smart as my husband, and there were a few results of people who had used pegboard in their kitchens.  In fact, some of them had taken the gross, ugly brown pegboard we had in our garage and painted it in fun, cool colors that really made their kitchen look cool!  And as I looked through all of the ways people used pegboard on Pinterst, I realized I needed a lot more pegboard.

As it turns out, Julia Child used pegboard in her kitchen and recommended it.  Well, I am not Julia Child, but if she can do it without feeling like a weirdo, I was all about it.  I just needed someone to say it was not weird. 

So I drug poor Jason back to the store and bought about a million more sheets of the (much less expensive!) brown pegboard.  We bought two giant sheets of it to hang on the walls, and I regulated the diamond pegboard to behind the door to hold the brooms and cleaning supplies. 

I also bought some smaller sheets of perboard to use as a backsplash to hold all of the gadgets we use when we cook so I wouldn't have to dig through all of the drawers to find a spatula.  Although not as pretty as the tile backsplash we'd bought, it was much, much more practical.  And in the end, thats the most important thing when it comes to a kitchen, and it was easy to return the tile.

Kenneling our dogs.  Providing water for the two cats and two dogs.

I knew I needed a quiet, out of the way space to kennel the dogs.  I wanted the dogs to feel safe and I didn't want them to add to the chaos our kitchen sometimes falls into.  I knew the pet water bowl needed to be easily available to all of the animals and near an outlet for the water pump.  I learned not to put the water bowl next to the kennel because it makes the cats scared to use it.  I provided water for the cats near their food bowl, water for the dogs in their kennel, and a community water bowl away from any of the animals' "territories."  I moved the dogs away from the door and I am hoping we will eventually install a counter over the kennels.  We have wire kennel which make travel easy, but the wire kennels don't give as good of a "den" feeling and I know the dogs like to be under things because they hang out under the nook and the coffee table when they aren't in their kennels.  So some day we will get rid of the microwave cart, put a counter in over the kennels, put the microwave on the counter and the dogs will feel safe and snug.

Looking good/showing off our cool kitchen stuff

I knew I wanted to find a way to show off my Fiestaware.  When we were looking for kitchen colors, I came across a neat kitchen.  While I was looking at this kitchen, I really fell in love with the open shelving they got from taking the doors off of the cupboards, so I thought I might try that on the cabinet that has my dishes in it.  I really love my Fiestaware and I thought open shelving would help me to show it off.

Open shelving

Providing a safe place for the baby to play while we cook

With all of this, I had to keep in mind that I couldn't store anything even remotely dangerous in our bottom cupboards or anywhere within reach of my daughter, which was very limiting.  I am a big fan on the Montessori principal of having kids do as much as they can as early as they can, so one of our lower cupboards is devoted to the baby's stuff so she can open the door and help herself to food she wants, her cups, her dishes, and her silverware.  In the other cupboards I have mixing bowls and other things she can safely play with to make drums out of or sort things in.

Read my "Making it Happen" blogs to see how we fixed our storage problems.