Phases in the Life of my Kitchen – Part 2

If you were patient enough to suffer through the ugly photographs in Part 1 of this post, you may read on ahead.  If you missed Part 1, please go back and read it so that the changes will make sense to you.  Yes, I am being bossy.  (The photo below is not my kitchen.  It was my inspiration for the changes we made.)

There was one other photograph that I forgot to mention that was also helpful in this redo phase.  I wanted the same color scheme found in Ina Garten’s barn kitchen.

I left you with a list of 3 problems we had to deal with in thinking about removing the wall between the dining room and the kitchen…basically, a change in flooring that wouldn’t match, a change in ceiling finishes, and the loss of a much needed pantry.  And all I gave you for suffering through the ugly photos was half of a photo of a transom and that inspiration picture from Country Living magazine.  Shame.on.me.

The Country Living kitchen made me realize that we could handle the change in ceiling materials by simply putting up the transom between the two spaces.  So that is exactly what my husband did.  He removed the pantry, knocked down the wall, and built the transom across the space.  One problem solved.

Here’s your view from the newly opened up dining room through the kitchen (finally)

Let me just say, you cannot imagine how happy this light-obsessed girl was when the first opening was broken through in that wall, and I could see all the way from our great room through the dining room space and out the kitchen window!

Now for handling the other problems:  There was enough room on the right hand side of the dining room to build a new pantry.  All the shelves and the double doors were reused in the new one.

For the flooring problem, I came up with the idea of building an island or bar or whatever it’s called, to cover the change in flooring (and it gave me more storage space – yippee!)  My husband designed and built it with some suggested “wishes” from me.

So now that you’ve got the “big picture” of the space, let me just walk you around the room.  The photograph looking through the dining room above was taken a year or so ago.  The rest of these are more recent.  (I just didn’t have a recent one that showed the transom and the pantry to include here.)  You might notice a few other changes from the first post if you are real observant…the light fixtures have been changed; the board and batten trim was removed from the dining room walls; the chairs have been replaced with schoolhouse chairs, and I have hung and painted a plate rack.

Hmm…after looking at these photos, I may paint that plate rack back white or at least find some more interesting plates to put there.  It looks kind of blah here.

Here’s a little closer look at the upper side that you saw in the first photograph from part 1 of the post where my daughter was sitting on the counter.

Then here is a better look at the window over the sink.

I took down the red and cream plaid drapes at the window and replaced them with black and white linen ones that I made.  The cream in the plaid just did not work well with the white cabinets.  Another change was my husband made little “feet” that we added to the bottom of the cabinets to give them more of a “furniture feel,” and also we removed the two upper cabinet doors on either side of the sink.  I have contemplated putting a linen skirt in place of the 2 cabinet doors below the sink, but have not quite sold myself on it yet.

Continuing on around the room….

Here is a view of the other side of the room…

and finally the kitchen desk area.

This is not a real big house.  In fact, I would call it cottage-like.  The kitchen is not a huge one, but the size works perfectly for us.  In the first house we built, our kitchen was very large, and the island in the middle of it was big enough to have a party around!  I decided when we built this one, that I did not want to have to keep such a large room clean…major job!  So this kitchen is about half the size of our previous one, but our screened porch is more than double the size of our former one!  I really do believe that our needs change as we go through life, and our homes should fit our needs.  This kitchen suits me just fine for now.

Hope you enjoyed the little tour around the room!  If you have any questions, I’ll be more than happy to try to answer them.