Kitchen reveal + Christmas cheer

So I started to record the process of our kitchen renovation more than a year ago… is anyone out there wondering if we’re still living with plywood counters and unfinished walls? Thankfully, we finished off the renovation last December, just a little shy of our due date deadline. Then we promptly took “after” pictures, documenting the completed kitchen with a dash of Christmas decor.

But between our new baby and Christmas festivities, I didn’t have a chance to post the photos on the blog until the Christmas season had passed. So I’ve been holding them until now when they’re once again in-season. So without further ado, a much-belated reveal of our Wild Oak cocina!

We brightened up the room with tile going all the way to the ceiling on one wall, using tumbled marble on the sides and a patterned porcelain tile over the stove (which resists stains better than marble). I also love the pretty pencil edge tile that separates the two. Yes, that’s a real baby in the pot, we couldn’t miss a moment to document our other masterpiece of 2014!!

Last year we spent a week in southern Spain for my sister’s wedding and were inspired by the gorgeous tile patterns and rustic roomy elegance of the European version of a country kitchen. Hence the vintage chandelier, farmhouse sink (ikea), and brass accents. We were delighted to find marble at a cheaper-than-corian price point and used it on the counters (danby marble from Vermont).

Opposite the newly enlarged window is a vintage chalkboard (craig’s list) hung above our former upper cabinets (now reused as lower pantry cabinets).

Facing the kitchen is a smaller family room space, with our sparkly tree and other Christmas touches.

Now let’s look back to when we first moved in to see how much things have changed! By selling the old granite and appliances, reusing cabinets, and buying used appliances and doing the work ourselves, the whole project came in well under our $10K budget. Most of the cost was for the wood flooring that we installed in both rooms, but what a difference that made in tying them together and flattering the stone fireplace. Here is the old view toward the sink.

And an old zoomed out view of the living space and kitchen (we removed that partial wall).

The expanded kitchen has become the hub of our home and it’s almost hard to remember it any other way, or the awkward but promising partial renovation stage. It’s such a fun space to decorate for the holidays, and I’m looking forward to pulling out our Christmas bins again soon!

Kitchen progress, stage 2

Ever since we moved in, we’ve been working in spurts on remodeling our kitchen. I wrote back in November about the progress we’d made – opening up the partial wall between the kitchen/living area, moving the oven, adding a hood, taking out the bar, and replacing the hardware/fixtures. But it remained very much unfinished, with exposed slab, dangling wires, and open walls. So when we found out we were expecting another baby, finishing the kitchen was one of the first items on our pre-baby bucket list – for the little one’s safety and to avoid indefinite home project purgatory.

When we took stock of all the work to be done and the accompanying dust and chaos, we decided that our best action plan would be for Erik to tackle the messiest jobs while the kids and I took a trip to North Carolina. While I was gone, he took a kitchen that started like this when we moved in:

And moved it most of the way toward its current status!

What better welcome home present?!?

The room looks so much larger now with continuous wood flooring and bright white cabinets!

We switched from a U to an island configuration, and faced the stools toward the window to take in the mountain views.

It’s so convenient to empty the dishwasher and place things into the drawers just opposite it. Eventually we’ll add a little open shelving on the wall just above the dishwasher for our most frequently used glasses and plates.

There’s still a ways to go until the kitchen is checked off our pre-baby list: new counters, replacing the window, finishing the drywall and installing wall tile, moving the light fixtures, and adding cabinetry around the fridge and hood. Basically, it’s almost finished below the counter line, but with bright blue dry wall and temporary materials above that point. We’ve already hosted many a meal with the new layout though, and it’s so much fun to have guests seated and snacking on the stools while I finish cooking. I’ve also loved having the kids color or snack at the island while I work in the kitchen. And we brought the kitchen a little bit into the living space which really makes sense considering how much time we spend there. It’s so gratifying to see our kitchen plans come to life and now we’re enjoying deliberating over the materials to finish up the job!

{I’ll try to write again later this week with more details on the construction/demolition process and our choices so far. You can find more photos here.}

Christmas catch-up: A holiday home

With all the busyness of Christmas hosting, advent-ing, and traveling, I didn’t find time to share photos of Christmas cheer around our home. Before it all gets packed up this weekend, here are a few pics from our wintry yuletide hacienda!

Some natural touches in the entry (and a glimpse of our mantle in-progress)

Lots of red and green in the front room

A close-up of the dining hutch and the kids’ gingerbread house

Mantle #1 in the front,

Mantle #2 on the back,

And my kid-magnet collection of nutcrackers.

A little Christmas in the kitchen…

And on the porch.

My only Christmas décor purchase this year was a big one… a new artificial tree! First we retired our decade-old petite one to the playroom (and trimmed it with shatter-proof ornaments).

Then we brought in this full-size beauty for the living room!

I love how it holds all our ornaments without looking crowded and the way my Danish hearts suit it so well.

Here’s hoping your Christmas was most merry, and that there’s room for the new tree in our garage storage area! (:

A cheery table for Thanksgiving

Sunday our afternoon schedule was cleared by an early snowstorm that dusted everything outside and hung thick clouds over the mountains. We played with the kids in the snow, Erik lit a fire in the wood stove, and I puttered away at our Thanksgiving table settings. 

I used our wedding china and turkey place card holders with a little ribbon embellishment for pizzazz,

In the middle is a thankful tree that Eleanor made in preschool. On it our girlie is quoted as being thankful for baby dolls, Mommy, Daddy, Luke and Russell (our pet lizard).

There’s my grandmother’s candlesticks and petite stemware, alongside some Target clearance faux acorn branches.

All atop some punchy autumn table linens and we’re ready for dinner! Oh, wait – there’s also the food shopping and cooking to attend to… off to pick up a turkey for me!

Five variations on an autumn mantle theme

Our house was built around a big double fireplace – doubling the fun for seasonal mantle-scapes! But the massive dark stones make it a little bit tricky to style – items that are too dark and/or small are easily lost. And I have trouble achieving the right balance between working with the dominant rustic casual feel of the stone and nudging it toward the prettier, more elegant style I prefer.

But who doesn’t love a challenge? Here are five autumn mantle scenes from the past couple months, and there have probably been a half-dozen more mantle iterations this season. I’m always adding, taking away, and rearranging. Sometimes I just happen to have the camera out to snap a few pics!

First a few Halloween-ish styles from October. I made the bunting with fabric scraps and the candelabras are from a cute resale shop in old town. The little owl on the right and the watercolor painting are both Luke and Mommy collaborations.

On the other side: sunflowers, a white pumpkin, and happy lanterns (an after-Halloween Target find a few years back).

Then there was a brief stage with homemade pumpkin garland and the kids’ autumn leaf wreath crafts. It was only captured as the background to my handy hubby…

Currently, we’re channeling turkey day, with two feathered fowls and autumn faux branches in the back.

And a festive handprint invite to Luke’s preschool Stone Soup feast plus a little wreath for the front room.

Most of our mantle items come from Target’s clearance endcaps – such an easy spot to check for seasonal markdowns. Any other mantle meddlers out there? I so enjoy easy little changes like these to make the house feel fresh and holiday-ready!

Kitchen progress à la carte

For some time we’ve been deliberating over a kitchen remodel. We’ve pondered the possibilities from every angle, producing pages of potential layouts, special features, pros v. cons, and debating each option backward and forward. We were hoping to arrive at a grand plan and then launch into it, but in the end we’re still not ready to commit the funds and time to anything too drastic. So we’ve put the ‘Stage 2’ remodel off for the time being, and (mostly) finished up ‘Stage 1’. For Stage 1 we’ve limited ourselves to the straightforward changes that we knew we wanted, provided they weren’t too costly and/or intertwined with the Stage 2 decisions.

This was the view toward the kitchen when we first saw the house.

Right away we started thinking about removing the full height section of wall that blocked the space off from the family room. That meant moving or replacing the double ovens behind the wall. The pinty pendants weren’t my style either and the big-screen microwave showpiece needed to go too.

We decided to sell the double ovens, range, and microwave on Craig’s List, and use those funds to buy appliances that better suited our style. I was initially quite pleased with myself for covering our new-to-us range and vent hood purchase costs with the Craig’s List sales, but once you add in the 8-hour round-trip drive to El Paso for the range, running gas pipe from the meter (the previous appliances were electric), and installing hood ducting through the roof, this switch-out was far from free. BUT the gas range is so much more responsive for cooking, the ducting keeps the kitchen tremendously cooler in the summer, and you can judge the aesthetics for yourself! I love the heavy duty grates on the Viking range and am so happy that I sought out a hood with more personality than the all-stainless models.

Instead of looking into the kitchen from the family room and seeing a huge microwave, there is this lovely view.

The range swap has allowed us to remove the chunky double-oven wall, producing a much more open flow between the spaces.

There are a few lingering tasks to complete, such as rogue wires, duct-taped drywall, and a patch of exposed slab where the ovens used to be. But let’s not think about that. Instead direct your attention to the new cabinet hardware (Home Depot super-clearance), the light fixtures (a terrific value at Lowe’s), and our bit of open shelving (a Pottery Barn shelf I’ve had for years). We took out a section of cabinets to allow for better sightlines to the kitchen window and more roominess when working at the counter.

Painting the walls, adding art, and replacing the flimsy faucet didn’t hurt either. Here’s another before…

And the happier after!

There’s still work to be done, but we feel so thankful to be spending Thanksgiving in a kitchen that suits our taste and lifestyle so much better. Down the road, we’d like to take out the soffit, replace the window with a larger unit, extend the cabinets to the ceiling, take out the peninsula and build an island, cabinet in the fridge, paint the cabinets (white I think?), replace the backsplash, and take up the wall-to-wall carpet and tile so we can re-floor the space with a single material, probably engineered wood.

But since each one of those tasks is slightly daunting on its own, a humongous run-on sentence of them begins to alarm me. Erik is loathe to hire out anything so they spell a long season of dust and caution tape. For now we’ll finish up a few Stage 1 loose ends (or wires), waiting for the right time to launch Stage 2 and stocking up on respirator filters!

Let me know if you have any kitchen Qs!

Living room progress: soft & serene

Half of our backroom is in a mild state of construction. Specifically the kitchen.

Erik took a small wall down, moved the stove, and a few other changes. We love the way it’s opened the space up, but… we’re not quite sure what to do next. So we’re living with it as is for a few months and weighing the possibilities. Who knows, if Erik is furloughed it could be sooner rather than later that we have some more demo action in the kitchen. We shall see!

But in the meantime, the other half of the room has come together. When we moved here, the coffee table was the only furniture that we brought with us for this space. For six months we lived with it as an empty play zone, and then I bought the couch on a Black Friday sale at Home Decorators collection. The yellow leather chair is a flea market find (from the 50s!), the other chair is a Pottery Barn floor sample. The dresser in the back is a Craig’s List piece we cleaned up and the dhurrie rug might be my greatest shopping score yet. I bought it new just this week for $25 including tax!

The room is currently referencing a touch of autumn, Albuquerque’s loveliest season. Four little pumpkins field-picked by the kids on a preschool field trip (above), a few lanterns on the mantle,

and our autumn doll friends up on a bookcase.

The glimpses of nature in the butterflies and landscape photos on the wall reflect the indoor/outdoor feel of the picture windows.

We’d love to change out the wall-to-wall carpeting for hard flooring since our kitchen table’s in the room too, but who knows when we’ll get to that phase. For now it’s a cozy sunny spot where Erik is currently reading books with the kids before diving into this morning’s home projects… a hood vent for the kitchen and a mini-split for the playroom/guestroom. Just in time for Auntie C’s arrival this afternoon we hope!