The House Part 7: The Kitchen and Dining Room

After the Munch's birthday, we stopped cold.  Just stopped.  We'd done a LOT, we were exhausted, and, frankly, we didn't have any motivation to keep going on the other things we had planned...our next expected party wasn't until Thanksgiving.

Well, obviously, Thanksgiving has come and gone, and we actually didn't have anybody but ourselves for it for a variety of reasons, but we did at least get the kitchen and dining up and running and painted before then...and technically, a lot was done in there before the Munch's birthday too...kinda had to be!

For starters, the kitchen had precious little storage space.  This is a problem in ANY Chicago kitchen...I've been extremely spoiled by the last 3 kitchens we've lived with, because the cabinetry and pantry space we had in those apartments was absolutely not the norm.  And since those last 3 apartments spanned almost the entirety of my 9+ years of married life, I've had a lot of time to adjust and grow into larger kitchens...I've got a lot of gadgets now...and I DO use all of them, even if some are less frequently used than others.  The existing space in the kitchen we purchased houses all but 2 of those gadgets.  JUST the gadgets.  Not the dishes or silverware, not the food.  Just the gadgets...  You see my problem.

Fortunately, the kitchen we purchased also happened to have a couple of blank walls.  Blank walls that were just staring at us, eagerly inviting us to fill it up with new cabinetry.  Which we did, before the party.  I've always secretly wanted a china cabinet...and I found the perfect one at a resale shop for (as resale shops go) dirt cheap.  A friend and I went on a 9-shop hunt for it (I'd picked out the thrift places most likely to have furniture that weren't too far to drive), and after a frustrating day found it literally at the 9th store.  I knew it was mine the minute I saw it.  It's beautiful and deep, fits all my china, adult and child dishes, silverware, and plastic storage bowls to boot...and it matches the color of our new cabinetry perfectly.  So that was wall number one, but my dining area was still chock full of bags and boxes of food that had no place to go.

Wall number 2 was filled up on my birthday weekend.  We'd ordered our prebuilt cabinets and countertop of choice from Home Depot, and it took a few days, as orders will do.  We were supposed to get everything in one big delivery, but wouldn't you know it, when they arrived that Friday, the keystone piece, the big 36-inch cabinet that would center everything, was missing.  Not.  Impressed.  Now we not only had food with no place to go, we had 4 big, boxy cabinets and a 6-foot countertop clogging up our space as well...Obviously, we raised a big stink, especially when they told us it might not get to us until Monday, when we would have no time until the next weekend to install things--you can't really be drilling holes into the other side of the wall that your child's bedroom shares when it's past her bedtime, y'know?  Well, miracles happen when you raise a stink apparently, because we got our 36-er special-delivered to us the very next day.  Which was my birthday, and not a day we'd planned for cabinetry set-up.  But at least we had our cabinets!!  Daddy talked up the cabinetry a bit at church the next day, and succeeded in convincing a couple friends who'd done work like that before to come over and help us out that afternoon.  They were a HUGE help.  We got the upper cabinets hung with their aid, then Daddy and I slaved into the very late hours to figure out how to shim up the lowers, which of course was much harder than one might imagine since of course the floors are not level...Big surprise... :/  They're about a half inch higher towards the rear of the original kitchen space than they are towards the front.  And they're not even level from the wall out to the center of the room.  Whyever would you think that would be the case?  :P  Ah, old houses...One way or another, we got it, and by Monday evening, my dining room was finally, FINALLY clearing out.  We still have to replace the doors on the existing cabinets, but we'll just have to deal with those for a while.  There are plenty of other more pressing things to be done for now.  And I just spent 3 paragraphs talking about cabinets.  Why did I ever think writing 1,500-word papers was hard?

 Anywho.  That was all before the Munch's party.  Then came the long pause...The rooms still desperately needed painting, which of course was the prerequisite before I could hang anything up.  I finally found a burst of energy when Daddy went away for his university homecoming weekend.  How fun would it be, so went my thinking, for him to come home to a fresh paint job?  So I hopped to it, and spent all day Friday and Saturday painting.  The Munch was wonderfully good the whole time--she loved watching me and talking to me about it, and when she wasn't watching, she was playing happily nearby--painting for herself with her new dot paints (which are awesome!  Why didn't I know about these when I was teaching??).  My painting had to be done in 3 layers--primer and 2 paint coats, which of course made it take longer, but things dried quickly.  The part that worried me was the dining room, which has ceilings that peak at about 13 feet.  Our ladder is foldable, which means it can be put into different shapes if needed, but I really didn't want to have to mess with that...it's heavy!  Turns out though, I am *just* tall enough to reach a 13-foot peak while still standing on the topmost safe rung of an 8-foot ladder.  One inch shorter and I wouldn't have made it.  Yay for that inch! :)

So now my dining and kitchen are painted and some stuff is hung.  Coats are finally off the table and on their wall hooks, and it's lovely to actually have some puzzles out again!  I've missed my puzzle gallery, but there just wasn't space at the last apartment.  I still want to put up some shelving for craft storage purposes in the corner near my dollhouse, but that will come.  First the light over the dining space desperately needs changing.  The stupid thing is a neon black light.  In the dining room.  It's a beautiful, expensive fan, but the light is totally useless, and all the stores we've talked to and taken the light to say we're going to have to replace the whole thing, fan and all.  Most of them didn't even know what the thing was.  Grrrr....

All that to say:  We have a lovely new kitchen and dining space:

The Kitchen:

Before.

Now.  Color!!!  Cabinets!!!  Our kitchen clock up in place of the ancient beast the old owner left for us.  And other fun stuffs on the walls.  I want to add things along the top wall over the counter to break up the green, but I haven't figured out what yet.  

The Dining Room and Craft Space

Before.  You see what I mean about that light?  Very pretty, very useless.  Especially in winter when we try to eat dinner...

Now.  My craft space is in the back, though proper storage shelving must still be purchased and installed.  The china cabinet can be seen next to the fridge...and yes, it's not quite straight up and down beside the fridge.  The floor in this back space slopes a tad too.  Are you surprised?  :)

Close-ups:  A couple of my favorite puzzles fill up the space above the Munch's coat rack, which was another gift from my nanny family--they'd bought a larger one to fit the needs of their larger family.  My Tigger and Pooh puzzles, completed long before the Munch came to be, appropriately grace a playspace.  She got quite excited when she saw them.  :)

The completion of these rooms left just 2 spaces left to be done on the main floor of our house...the tiny hallway, and our relatively large bedroom.  That post will follow soon...