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Do you guys remember this?
And how I was agonizing over a backsplash here? And here?   And talking about trying something dashing with paint here? Like this?


Well I finally figured out three important things about me and my backsplash dilemma.

1. I do not have the patience to paint fake tile or the ability to deal with it looking craptacular.
2. I do like the fact that paint is cheap and I can change it whenever I feel like it with nothing involving electricity or power tools.
3. I love stripes.

yum!

Hey guys.  I should be back with some pics of the deck at some point in the next month.  Summer takes it's toll on us around here, both because of the heat and because of the thing where we work at a school and summer is the big time to make improvements at work.  whew.

In any case, here's a pinterest board I did for a friend's office: http://pinterest.com/thwomp/office-decor/  

Also, I am considering doing this to my backsplash, since I am trying to do something pretty on the cheap while we work on functional projects like "making the bathroom not leak into the other bathroom" and stuff.

from DIY network

The Kitchn has an article about white kitchen appliances!
We specifically chose white for our kitchen for a variety of reasons:

1. They are cheaper.  Seriously, for consumer grade stuff, stainless costs more for no added functionality.  (This is not the same if you are buying fancy pro or prosumer appliances.  Those are basically all stainless.)
2. I wanted to lighten up the dark cabinets.  We have a lot of dark in the kitchen.  White seemed like a nice choice to balance that out.
3. White appliances don't date all that quickly and I'm cheap.  I don't want to replace my appliances if I don't have to, and I do fear that stainless will be the harvest gold of the 2000-2020 time period someday.  I could totally be wrong, but really, white is nice and neutral, so even if I am, I don't really think it matters.  White appliances are not much of a gamble.

I'm not loving the stove but it's really black & white and not plain white.

To be fair, I liked my stainless appliances from our old house just fine, though they did have a layer of dog snot at snout high basically all the time.  That was a much lighter kitchen, however.

I am loving the retro and vintage stoves in that The Kitchn post.  Very cute!  I can feel myself gravitating towards a white viking range, though.  Man, those are pretty.  The one here has mirrors for a backsplash so you can see behind you.  Brilliant!

Hey, do you guys remember the backsplash I was going to use?

like, as an accent not 100% squirrels

The rest of the house is similarly pretty.

The Kitchn blog has this awesome post about how to build your own outdoor kitchen.


It's secretly a link to this PDF: http://www.studiomama.com/instructions/sm_outdoorkitchen.pdf


I totally love this!  I can just see myself outside chopping and rinsing.  Once upon a time, we had an "Outdoor Kitchen" grill that I bought for Jeff for his college graduation, but that ultimately disintegrated over the five years that we had it.

Up next for our foursquare is the back deck.  It has decking!  It has a platform for stairs!  It's coming soon to a suburban residence near you!  Hopefully, we'll have it in the next two or three weeks.

It has been EPICALLY hot here.  I realize that folks from the south are now laughing at my definition of 95 degrees as epically hot.  We're in Pennsylvania.  Hot.  Plus, we had to move the AC unit to build the new kitchen addition, and have not replaced it yet.  Hopefully, a new AC unit is coming soon to a suburb near me.

Happy June, folks!

OK, I have dilly dallied long enough on showing off some kitchen pictures.  Before you scroll down, please keep in mind a few things:

1. I need to figure out how to better operate my camera.
2. I need a new white shiny stove
3. I need to figure out what to do about my backsplash

I have totally weird issues about wanting a desk.  I don't know that I can adequately explain them, but suffice it to say that i will not share a desk or a dessert item.  (Hey, everyone has their own weirdness!  Back off!)

The kitchen was designed to have a wall of desks for the family, but largely for me.  My son has taken over the smallish desk that we had there (taken from another room) so we decided that we needed to investigate different/better desk options.  We went back and forth on what kind, and finally ended up at IKEA, home to a desk that you can fit in any location in your house.

Hooray for my new desk!

I love it!!!!!

Creative framing, right?

Next up, I am going to paint the wooden tulips on the left window so that they all match and are red.  My husband's grandmother gave them to us over the years; her husband made them before he passed away, so they are special to us and we've had them in every kitchen we've been in since we got married. I think it's OK to paint them, though, and since our kitchen has red and white and green, red + green tulips seem like a good thing.

So what do you guys thing of this backsplash tile?

I have been obsessing about my new kitchen for well over a year at this point.  I have gone through a zillion different countertops that I thought I would use.  Here they are, in the order I thought about them.

1. Carrera Marble.  So pretty!  But a friend looked at a house with marble counters and it turns out marble does not wear very well and requires a lot of maintenance.  I'm super lazy.  pass.
2. Butcher Block.  Also pretty!  But again, maintenance.  Plus, I had this idea that I would get white cabinets, and I ended up falling in love with Kraftmaid's Kaffe stain and I didn't like the combo.
3. Quartz!  Zodiaq has this color that looks kind of like the marble.  Cool!  It's not exact, but it's evocative of marble.  Great.
4. Different Quartz! Hold the phone.  Blanco City Silestone looks pretty sweet next to my cabinets.  This is prolly the way to go.  Plus, it's cheaper than the Zodiaq.  Cool. Wait, stop.  You can't take hot things out of the oven and put it on quartz?  How does that work?  And why am I getting super expensive stone countertops that I can't put hot things on?  I might as well just use...
5. Ceramic tile.  Which I had in the old house, and we could do cheaply and ourselves.  Except it really isn't what I wanted at all and my husband told me he was NOT installing a ceramic tile counter.  Fair enoug.
6. Granite.  I don't know how we didn't just start here, to be honest.  Home Depot had a pretty killer sale, which resulted in us paying basically 25% less than we expected to spend.  My original issue with granite is that I am too lazy to seal it.  Home Depot claims theirs is already sealed and won't need to be resealed for 15 years.  I can probably pull myself together to seal it when my kid goes to college.  Sounds good.

I also put a green background instead of the white so I could actually see it a little better.  If you look at the other picture, you can see how they tried to put seams together, so that the pattern of the granite is mostly uninterrupted.  I think the only place where it looks obviously different is near the sink on the left, but I think the pattern is small enough that it doesn't matter.

Here it is with the white background, looking suspiciously like the original marble I thought I might like. In a cruel twist of remodeling fate, it's likely to be installed the day I leave for a conference for work.  I'm over it.

I told Jeff I thought the sink (included with the deal) looked kinda small.  He told me "That is like FOURTEEN FEET of countertop.  The sink is not small. )

He's probably right.

He usually is.

As I've mentioned here zillions of times before, I am kind of obsessive about researching and worrying about things we might buy.

The new thing I am obsessing about lately is what range to get.

First off, I have kind of wanted a slide in, white range with a ceramic top because I have this idea that it's easy to clean.  Kind of like this:  (Bear with me, I am trying this amazon link thing for the first time.)



Anyway, now I am starting to freak out for a few reasons:

1. Does a slide in need to have some kind of notch taken out on the countertop?  Do I need to have the range before I get the countertop?  Cause I was planning on just using my old gas one for a while and then replacing it later.  
2. I am moving from gas to electric.  I have never cooked on an electric stove, but I also detest cleaning my gas stove.  I have never had a gas stove that I felt came completely, spotlessly clean.  That may be commentary on my skill as a housekeeper (yeah, I'm no good in that department), but I also don't want to spend a thousand bucks on something that I ultimately don't like

I think, at this point, that I have picked all the major finishes for the kitchen.

My son pretty much never wants to get dressed in the morning. About a year ago, we started telling him "Pants are Happening!" We even sing it sometimes. I am not sure if it helps or not, but I do feel like singing "Construction is Happening!"

We got sick. One after the other, after the other. Now we are mostly healthy! While we were sick, lots of progress as been made.

Today is the day where things cost more than we think they should.

So!