the HAPPY kitchen.

My kitchen is the room in my home where I love to be.  It's the room where my kids look for me first if they aren't sure where I am.

 I LOVE that.  Because I was the very same way.

I knew that I could find my mom in the kitchen.  It's where she paid the bills with my dad and helped us with our homework.  It's where we snapped beans and shelled the peas from our garden.  It's where many a memorable family conversation took place standing by the kitchen sink or sitting around the table.  Often times the counter tops were covered in rows of hot cookies, waiting for a household of 9 hungry mouths to devour them.  It's where I remember my mom shaking a heavy pot over the stove, making popcorn the old-fashioned way for a family home evening treat.  I also remember thinking how efficient my mom was to have two or three of us on the kitchen floor with hot, soapy rags, mopping away - each of us with a butter knife in hand to scrape up any stubborn, dried food that wouldn't come up with our wet rag.  (Yes, even that is a happy memory.)  When I go to my childhood home, it's still the room where I find my mom.   The room that I want to be in.

When we moved into our home 6 years ago, this is what my kitchen looked like:

 It was a clean kitchen; decent size.  But the green wasn't my favorite, and something I knew I would eventually change.  I spent months thinking about what color I would change it too.  And one word kept coming to mind:

 Happy.

I wanted a happy kitchen.

 And yellow makes me happy:

  The mug holder makes me very happy.

And here's a close-up of three of the many things that make OUR family happy:

What's not to love about homemade pie, rootbeer (in a frosted mug of course), and popcorn (still made the old-fashioned way)?......Yes, not the healthiest arrangement of signs - I know.  But all things in moderation, right?       

It's a happy kitchen.

a breather

I put my blog on hold for nearly a year and a half with the hopes of trying to be able to grab hold of the reins of life for a while.

Did it work?  Naaaaaahhhh.

But I do know that in this time, a lot has transpired.

For instance, I have a teenager now:

 And he's 6" taller.  And very entertaining.



Oh, and I had a baby:

But she's not a lil' peanut anymore:

She's almost one!

And my Evelyn....oh my Evelyn. Where do I start?

 Lets just say that she's not just adding gray hairs on her momma's head :)

One of my favorite photos...

They're looking remarkably calm considering there were barking dogs on the other side of that fence

Thanks Linds.  You are an amazing sister.  And photographer.

Our Thursday

Spent the day watching Porter's second to last game of the season.

He's had an amazing one.

And his little sis readily agrees.

I hope to slowly start blogging again over the next little while.  We'll see.  

I've been busy growing a little one in my womb as of late.  And I'm still green.

  

from green to......???

And so the renovations begin.

It actually began over a month ago, but I'm just now getting the time to post these pictures.

Our kitchen is getting a facelift.  And it has been so much fun!

My sister-in-law once told me that the kitchen is the one room in your house that should make you giggle when you walk into it.  I really love that philosophy.

This past month, we have been working on adding trim, hardware, and painting the kitchen cabinets.

My kitchen used to, in the not so distant past, look like this:

notice the color, and the flat fronts of the cabinets and drawers 

And then we decided to get creative and add some interest and functionality with our self - constructed hanging mug holder:

Oh how I love this mug holder!  It has brought me joy.  Really it has.  (And giggles)

We began the next phase of kitchen renovations by taking the cabinet fronts off and adding a simple piece of trim:

  Evelyn watched in amazement as Bill ran a bead of wood glue down the trim before he nailed it down.  She ran over to me confused, and said, "Mommy, why daddy put mustard on it?"   We laughed and laughed! 

We then spent the next week and half painting three coats onto them, letting them dry really well in between coats.  We added some black knob hardware, and this is what we ended up with:

Ignore the underside of the countertop please...it's getting replaced very soon.

I think it's really amazing how much the hardware and that little bit of trim has given the cabinets an entirely different look.

I gave myself headaches trying to narrow down a color.  But when all was said and done, it always came back to this buttery yellow.  Why?  Because I have always loved yellow.  Yellow makes me happy.  And I love what it has done for my kitchen.  It's welcoming, bright and cheery.    

We are going fairly dark on the new countertop that will be installed.  They are actually going to be similar in shade to our wood floors.  That should happen within a week.  And then comes the building of the dining room arch and painting the kitchen walls. 

The fun is just beginning.

And I plan on documenting it all.