Kitchen Musings: Before

You will very soon get tired of me asking for opinions on all things new house, and I totally understand if you just skip these posts! But if you're not easily bored and want to give me some kitchen advice, I'd love it!

Okay, so here you see part of the kitchen from the living room (also painting supplies and a whole bunch of junk) - Cecilia's in the living room, and then the pillar and the brick column separate the dining room from the kitchen (I'm fairly certain these all used to be broken up into separate rooms, and much prefer the way they've been opened up!). So now that I think about it, we might be able to gate off the area between the wood pillars, the area between the brick column and that other pillar, and possibly the area from the brick to the back wall to keep Peter away from the wood stove, right? Theoretically?

But how hard is it to screw a baby gate into brick? Pretty hard? Not a great idea? 

Looking at this picture, I'm not realizing that Andrew didn't see that that top left corner up there is still yellow, not white like the rest of the kitchen... And will very likely need priming & painting in the near future so we don't have a random yellow square up there. Whoops!

The kitchen is currently full of a TON of stuff because we got the wood floors sanded & sealed this week, and thus couldn't put anything on them. Hence the exercise ball randomly by the sink.

Also ignore the door that fell off the cabinet above the ovens. Ovens. I used to think I would never need a double oven, but now if I want to I can bake FOUR LOAVES OF BREAD at once! And ALL the pizzas!

I'm still trying to figure out how to arrange things in here - I think *total* we've got about as much counter space & cabinet space as our current kitchen, but it's not laid out in the most efficient manner, so I'm trying to figure out where to logically put things... Like those glass cabinets above the range? It would make so much sense to have baking stuff and spices and things up there, but those things aren't pretty (aside from my mixing bowls, which are pretty) and don't make sense in glass cabinets!

Also, why is there a range and that handle there but nothing but dead space under the range? And the same under the ovens - wouldn't it make sense to make that into some sort of cabinet?

That sink! All that sunlight!

Those shelves, though... I'm trying to come up with a solution to replace them - I adore what Ginny has going on here and we *do* have a couple fallen trees on our property that need to be dealt with, but I don't see that happening any time soon! 

The dishwasher is to the left of the sink, and there's no cabinet above it, so I'm trying to figure out where exactly to put dishes... I suppose I could put them in the glass cabinets? Or to the left of the dishwasher, there's a kind of pantry area between the dishwasher and the fridge, so I might take the top shelf of the pantry for dishes. I just don't know.

I think we could pretty easily mount something like this to the wall above the dishwasher, but I don't think it would actually hold enough dishes... Actually, I wonder if it would fit on the walls next to the sink? But it's $80, and I have to imagine we can probably come to a less expensive solution.

And add to that the fact that we're in need of new dishes since we have hardly any left of our current set... Well, it's just plain hard to choose dishes! We started our marriage with a cheap IKEA set that ended up breaking over the years. Then we got our current set, which has also slowly ended up breaking. 

So we've been looking at a million different sets of dishes online, trying to decide what we want... I think just something solid-colored, easy to match, cheap enough that we can replace it if it breaks. We're down to these two:

Blue, simple, little detail (but Andrew thinks it might be too close to the wall color we chose, although I don't know why that matters)

White, no mugs, more place settings (we never use the mugs, so I kind of think it's a plus NOT to have them to deal with!)

And now I'm going to stop writing because this has never been a blog about home decorating or anything like that. Maybe I can convince Sheena to fly to Virginia and make all these decisions for me? Emily's probably too busy with her own remodel to help!