Cooking, Travel and just Other Stuff

You have to understand. I come from a line of very crafty people. My sister paints, one niece can knit anything out of a ball of yarn...oh and she paints and wood carves and makes jewelery. The other niece designs things and then sews them and then my great niece...well we will just call her insanely crafty. They all have blogs where they show all of their wonderful things they do. So, that brings me here. I decided I wanted a blog too, but what to write about. I'm not insanely crafty, can't paint, don't wood carve, tried knitting-didn't work....hummm, what do I do? Well, I like to cook and travel and eat, so I thought maybe we can start there. My blog will be about recipes I've made, places I go and restaurants I eat at with a few other things thrown in along the way. I've also heard that writing is good for you brain, so I figure-as I'm getting older now-this could be a good thing. So anyway, if you find my rantings worth commenting over, I'd love to hear from you. If I post a recipe you like, please let me know, other wise you can keep your opinions to yourself. This, after all, is my blog to make myself feel better, to try and compete with my family, because I don't do anything crafty.

Friday, April 20, 2012

Remodel....Done!!!

Okay, so after 3 weeks the kitchen is finally done. I am so glad to have my kitchen back and be back to cooking. With the space I had to work with to try and make the area look bigger and have more space, I think we did a good job. You can only expand so far when the kitchen is in the middle of the house. I do love it!
Old stove area
New stove area

The cabinets have an "espresso" finish on them. I don't think I have said this before, but my daughter-in-law designed my cabinets. Julie works for a cabinet company as a designer.We got her discount on the cabinets-lucky us! She put in all the bells and whistles. The drawers are self-closing and the shelves pull out. We replaced all the appliances with Stainless. I love the clean look of the stainless steel.
Old laundry room
New butlers pantry
I love this area much better then when it was the laundry room. It gives me so much more counter top and cabinet space and it's really no big deal to walk out into the garage to do laundry.
old frig area
New frig area
We did the area around the frig with a pantry. The lower cabinet has pull out shelves making it easier to get to everything. It is deep and big! Love it!
Old kitchen looking from family room
New kitchen looking from family room
I just looks so much richer. Lowering the island gives me so much more counter work space, so even though I lost a little counter where the new pantry is I gained it with island work space which is what I needed. We also replaced the old can lights with the new LED can lights. It makes such a difference as far as a true light goes.
This is a pull out next to the stove. I love this feature. I use it to hide things that were sitting on my counter before and some of the bigger spice containers.

The pull out garbage can. Can I just say how much I love this! Yes, yes i can!

This is the back splash. It is a limestone tile bordered by a travertine rope with glass tile insets.

Granite counter tops.
I still have the painting left to do but that will come later. We have a few more things we are going to do to the family room space before I have the painting done. But that's another blog.

All of the work was done by DiChristina Custom Builders and they did a fabulous job. If you need some work done give John a call. I can't say enough good things about his work. He is reliable, trust worthy and reasonable. And one of the most important things-finished in a very timely manner. Highly recommend him and his wife Linda. If you need some remodeling done in our area give him a call at (916) 799-8501 or john@dcbuilder.com

I got some of my ideas at: houzz.com. If you have not discovered this website it is fabulous for ideas. It lets you save things you like to ideabooks so you can go back and readily found them. Fun site.










Saturday, April 7, 2012

Kitchen Redo

It has been a while since I have taken the time to post anything on here, but some of you have been asking what we are doing so I thought I would start posting something today. Some of you have had to listening to my whining on Facebook. I don't mean to whine it's just that I like to cook and have not been able to do so for over two weeks. Money guy and I are REALLY tired of eating out. Last week's saving grace was that we went to Las Vegas for four days so at least I didn't have to be here. It's like I don't know how to function without my kitchen. Anyone else have this problem or is it just me? Probably me, huh? Oh well it should be done by next Tuesday and I will be all back together by next weekend. I can't wait. I don't think I will want to go out to dinner for a while. Anyway, here are some pictures to show you what been up. I will post the grand finale when it's done.
So the first thing we did was take the half wall out. Sorry I don't have a better picture but I guess I just never took a picture of it. The wall was between the living room and dining room. I always felt like it made the room look smaller. Your eye stopped at the wall, so we had it taken out. Love it! 
It will really make a bigger difference when we get the hardwood floors done and your eye doesn't break at the carpet. The next thing we did was move the laundry room out to the garage. Since our kitchen is in the middle of the house there is no way to make it larger without taking in the laundry room. So that's what I did.
This is what the old laundry room looked like. It is 
now called the butler's pantry.
After we did that the door needed to come out and make an arch to open the room up and make it look a part of the kitchen.
Old doorway

New arch


So that was the beginning. I will post some more later but right now I need to go hide Easter eggs.