Our Kitchen

I know many of my readers have actually been to my home and seen it in the flesh, but just in case you aren’t one of those people, I’ve decided to open up my home for a little tour.

Today I’ll be showing you our breakfast room and kitchen.  I actually consider these two rooms to be the same space, because they are totally open to one another.

Let’s begin in the breakfast area, shall we?  The best feature in this room is, without a doubt, the windows - wall to wall, and nearly floor to ceiling.  One hundred twenty square feet of glass!  Talk about a light-filled room!

Originally these windows were undressed, but…

Sunlight and little red couches don’t mix.

A couple of months after we bought the couch, I noticed that it wasn’t quite as vibrant as it once was.  Yeah, the couch was fading.  Eek!

The solution?  Blinds.

This little birdhouse was a Christmas gift.  It’s got good bones, but originally it was red and blue and green.  Not the best color combo for my décor, so I gave it a couple of coats of white paint.  Much better!

Here’s the table at which no one eats.  Ha ha.  Well, sometimes we eat here, but to be perfectly honest, we take most of our meals sitting on the living room floor around the coffee table. (And we wonder why our children won’t sit in their chairs when we go out to eat…)  This table didn’t come with any matching chairs.  I scored this set of four chairs at a flea market for $100.  After a new paint job, some distressing (what can I say, I’m a shabby chic gal), and some reupholstering, I think they look pretty darn cute.

This little cabinet was FREE!  It was being tossed out of a Sunday school class at church, so I brought it home with me.  I did nothing to this cabinet but give it a good cleaning.  Its white, crackling paint is right up my alley.  Inside the cabinet, Lucy’s toys are neatly hidden out of sight.  Except of course for the ball poppers.  Thank you Papa and Sandy for providing us with not one but TWO of these incredibly annoying toys.

The kitchen and breakfast room are separated only by this peninsula, so while I’m cooking or washing dishes I have a great view of the backyard through that vast expanse of windows.

One of my favorite things about this house is in the photo right below…

The DISHWASHER!!!!!!!!  Woop woop!  Can you see it?  I love that it’s disguised with a cabinet door.  Another thing you may notice in this picture is that I have two different countertops.  Granite counters cover the cabinets around the perimeter of the room, and there is a butcher block top on the center island.  I love the combination of the two surfaces.  Both have their advantages.  One of the best things about the granite is that when you pull a hot dish out of the oven, you can plop it down right on the granite, no worries.

Here’s a handy little kitchen gadget – a magnetic knife block.  Soooooo useful.  If you don’t have one, I highly recommend it.

Here’s our pantry, or at least our pantry door.  No way am I taking a picture of the inside!  This little closet is in need of some serious organization.

Notice anything missing in this picture?  A doorknob.  This door, like most others in our home, came from an old hotel in our hometown.  My family owned the old building when I was a kid and, through the years, we used it for architectural salvage.  The pieces we brought down from there have so much character.  No two doors are exactly alike.  The only problem is that it is difficult to find hardware for them.  We finally installed a simple latch on this door to keep little Lucy out. 

Remember I told you my family owned the old hotel building in town?  Well, the bottom floor of the building was a pharmacy about 60 or 70 years ago.  This beautiful cabinet came out of that pharmacy.

That in itself is a good story, but there’s more.

In the 1950’s my grandfather suffered and died from a disease known as Myesthenia Gravis.  He purchased his medication from this particular pharmacy…

More specifically, off of this particular cabinet…

Even more specifically, off this particular shelf…

This is the original label taped to the back of the cabinet right where his medicine was located.  $3.75 for 50 tablets.  I think it is wonderful that he was only charged 1/2 price.

You can tell from that picture that the cabinet used to be green, but a couple of years before it came into my possession, the cabinet was stripped of all its paint.  Thankfully, whoever stripped it took care not to disturb the label.  Talk about a piece with history!

What southern woman would be caught dead with out a few of these…cast iron skillets.  Most of these belonged to my grandmother.  My mother “generously” gave them to me in a long-neglected, rusty, dusty state.  Well, after a good scrubbing and a couple of rounds through the oven to season, they are black and shiny and good as new.  The only problem now is that my mother wants them back!  Ha! Not happening.

Moving around the room is the pass thru to the dining room.  (You can read more about the dining room here.)  The tiny chalkboard in the corner belonged to my mother when she was a little girl.

This is just a portion of my ever-increasing collection of cookbooks.  I hate really don’t like to read “book” books, but I can read a cookbook like it is a novel.  The book on the stand is from my grandmother’s collection.  It was compiled by a small country church some 50 years ago.  Many of the recipes were submitted by my family members…

Including this one from my great-grandmother.

I mentioned earlier that I have two different countertops in my kitchen.  I also have two different cabinet finishes.  The majority of the cabinets are painted cream and finished with an antiquing glaze, but the island is a horse of a different color – black.  When I originally revealed my plan to paint the island black, I got a lot of raised eyebrows in response.  But I love the way it turned out, and I think everyone else does too.  I get a lot of compliments on the color, and I’m glad I went with my gut.  There are supposed to be three barstools down the back of the island, but I’ve had to temporarily remove them because of a certain little monkey.  Lucy is the world’s worst climber, and she has taken a tumble from the top of a stool more than a few times.  So for safety reasons, I’ve moved the stools out of sight.

How do you like my pot rack?  You may have seen it before in this Christmas post, but I wanted to show you what it looks like every other day.  No family history involved here.  This is just an old ladder I picked up at an antique store on the banks of the Mississippi River.

Well, that concludes our little tour for the day.  I’ve really enjoyed getting to cook in this kitchen for the past four years.  After moving from a kitchen where you could wash dishes and cook on the stove, all while sitting at the dinner table, who wouldn’t love this kitchen?

Over the next few weeks I hope to show you around a few other rooms in our home.  If you are new to my blog you may want to check out this and this post showcasing a couple of the other rooms in our home.

Lindsey

Linking to:

Nifty Thrift Tuesday @ Coastal Charm

Weekend Wrap-up @ Tatertots and Jello

Ta Da Tuesday @ Mommy by Day, Crafter by Night

Whatever Goes Wednesday @ Someday Crafts