Hello friends! Sorry for such a great delay. We never anticipated taking several months off from blogging to get moved in... but once we got in, I didn't want to take pictures until we had things like art on the walls, stuff in the cabinets, etc. We are still greatly lacking in the window-treatment department but since we live in the country, I figure anyone who gets an eyeful of one of us streaking through the house probably shouldn't be looking in our windows in the first place!
We would never make it as professional bloggers around here!
Finally I have began to amass enough pictures of different areas of our house in a semi-clean, photogenic state, that I'm finally ready to start posting them for the world. I know it makes the most sense to start with outside shots and work our way in, but in my usual, nonsensical way, we're starting with the kitchen and dining area.
Starting with the first picture... our dining area! It's just to the side of the kitchen, which is great because everyone in our family congregates in that area to begin with. The table seats eight pretty comfortably, and for Sunday dinner we drag in a few more folding tables and as many chairs as we can find. Sometimes we have 20 people for dinner on Sunday. Hopefully as the weather gets warmer, we can branch out onto one of the patios.
Next, the kitchen. This picture was pretty much taken from the head of the dining room table. I've got a long workspace with lots of countertop space to spread out on. My groovy stove is on the right. I am SO, SO, SO happy to have a gas stove after having to cook with electric heat for the last few years. Everything seems to taste better.
Ha! I just noticed the giant Sonic cup next to the stove. I think I have a Sonic issue.
Looking ahead in this pic, the groovy fridge is on the left, and tower-of-ovens is on the right. The fridge is the french-door style with the fridge part on the top, freezer drawer on the bottom. I love the fridge part. Everything we use is at about eye-level, it's wide, so you don't have to stack stuff super deep and then realize "oooh... I didn't know we already had 7 containers of sour cream or whatever."
The freezer drawer is pretty dinky. I've got waffles, popsicles and frozen fruit in there, and about everything else is in the garage freezer. So I would recommend this only if you have a spare fridge or deep freeze.
Here's a picture of our groovy ovens. The top one is the GE Advantium, which works as both a microwave and a second oven. It uses micowaves, convection and various other wicked cooking technologies so that it can heat up pizza or bake bread or roast a chicken... freaky, but cool. One of my favorite things about it is all of the pre-set recipes... such as these next two pictures... something we don't eat around here very often... and something that has come in handy on quite a few occasions!
The middle oven is a traditional trivection oven and is great for baking and burning things (my usual two outcomes!). The bottom drawer is the warming drawer... great for when you need to cook multiple things in the oven at different temperatures but want them all hot for serving at the same time...
This picture shows the island in the kitchen. Again, lots more counterspace, a groovy dishwasher, super deep sink, and my favorite appliance, the ice maker! I am an ice junkie, and it seems like an ice maker in the fridge can never make enough ice for our needs. Other than the little "plink" "plunk" "plunk" noises that it starts making in the middle of the night popping out little ice cubes we love our little ice maker... and the ice it makes is really cute, and thanks to it's squarish-shape and large amount of surface-area the ice cubes take a long time to melt. It is SO cool... sorry about that! :)
On the top side of the island, where all the fruit is, is the big bar area. We are still looking for barstools, but for now it's a great place to line dishes and things up when we have big dinners, and is a giant magnet for all the junk mail and papers Vivi brings home from school. After a few days it gets so tall you can't see the stove, so then we just bring in the trashcans and clear it out.
The last two pictures just show a view of the stove from the far side of the island. Our groovy Zephyr hood is super nice, but since the pipe goes waaayyyy up the wall, we are still in discussion as to how to cover that up. Our builder has told us that custom pieces of stainless steel need to be formed to wrap around it, to match the two or three segments of steel it came with. I keep thinking it would be really cool to find some other way to cover it up... corrugated metal? old barrels? milk barrels? it'll probably be 20 years before we ever do anything with it! Art trumps functionality around here.
The final shot is just one of the three little counter-spaces on the wall with the fridge and the ovens. One holds the scale, one is Ian's coffee and toaster center, and this one so far is Viv's art gallery and a holding place for whatever cookbooks I've borrowed from the library.
Next up... my laundry room??? Viv's room???? The outside of the house??? Come back tomorrow to find out!!!
