Whoa, what a two weeks we had! Immediately following the last post about how the cabinets were getting installed, we had my niece and nephew stay with us for "Cousin Camp" week. My kids and two of my sister-in-law's kids of similar ages go to Creative Arts Camp at LifePoint Church and the cousins stay with us through the week because they live an hour away and it makes the week just that much more special. The cousins had seen the old kitchen ripped out, but they got a taste of what it was like to live out of the kitchen-dining room-living room all-in-one basement for a week. I t ..read more

    After the walls were smooth, we could get the cabinets installed! Clearly, this is one of the most exciting steps, but it is also a slooooow one. Half a day went into just getting the cabinetry that will surround the fridge just right. The pantry was also a multi-day process. But then came the island, which magically got set in place in less than a day and then officially installed the next day. This was the moment I was sort of holding my breath over--would all the little squares of space on my graph paper add up to enough actual floor space for traversing around both sides of t ..read more

    I can't believe a month and a half of work has already gone by! We moved our first-floor furniture to the basement and upstairs in early June and then demo began. Not wild and crazy demo with a pack of contractors in matching shirts and crow bars like they do on HGTV, but really just removing parts bit by bit as the old was in the way and needed to make room for the new. The carpet with gross stains in the dining room is STILL in place, with about a dozen new stains, but it won't come out until the popcorn ceiling above is ground down and smoothed over.     We've g ..read more

     My last post was about choosing the three major finishes of a kitchen: cabinets, countertops and floors. It was a big relief to have those settled, but there were still other choices to be made.      One major factor in setting the feel of a kitchen is lighting. Our house is an early 90s house and the lighting situation was pretty dim (pun intended). The kitchen had a ceiling fan with 4 lights that looked original to the house, and the last owners had updated the breakfast nook and dining room with two insufficient pendant lights. The great room had anot ..read more

    My last post about the kitchen was in March, which feels like way more than two months ago. During my writing break, we took a family Spring Break to Savannah; I started teaching fifth grade grammar and writing at the kids’ school; and I even picked up third grade math for the last few weeks before summer break! It was kind of a whirlwind. I am so glad I picked up the grammar and writing class because it was Rye’s class and I get a kick out of his cohort, but all the prep and grading was very challenging. Hats off to people who teach five days a week and still manage to ..read more

    As I stated in my last blog, the cabinets in the kitchen of our new house are original to our 1991 home, but that’s not the reason we wanted to remodel the kitchen. The problem is that it has a tight U-shaped layout with 48 square feet of standing space inside our U of cabinets and major appliances. Overall the room is larger thanks to a generous breakfast area and room for sitting at the counter on one side. But as homeschoolers, we are home A LOT and are eating and cooking CONSTANTLY. And we are in each other’s way. All. The. Time. The first floor of our home is 1,100 square fe ..read more

   As I mentioned in my last post, Josh and I knew we wanted to remodel the kitchen when we bought the new house, but I had agreed to wait two years so we could feel the space out and see what we really wanted. The house still had the original oak kitchen cabinets but one of the past two homeowners had recently upgraded the plastic countertops with a new surface coating. The cabinets have that late 80s/early 90s orangey-oak hue and I sometimes get splinters from the particle board shelves, but my biggest peeve is the lack of interior shelves in the lower cabinets and the deep blind c ..read more

      “On this day, 15 years ago,” a Facebook memory reminded me on Jan. 22, I had shared my status of “is excited to see her countertops go in today!” (Sorry, I used to post in third person for some reason.) I screenshotted the memory and texted it to Josh. “Would that make remodeling a kitchen a 15-year itch for you?” he replied. Ha! As if I would ever remodel the gorgeous kitchen we created out of a gigantic dining room/bedroom in the George Street house! (see photo at the end of this post) No, dear friends, in my blogging silence over the past three years, Josh and I so ..read more

  During Valentine's week, while signing his name on packets of heart-shaped gummies to give out to his classmates in preschool, Knox commented, “I don’t like girls.” To which I said, “But I’m a girl.” And thus he adjusted his statement to, “Unless the girls are mommies.” I loved this response. Perhaps I should have felt more special if he had said “except for you,” but it was made more enjoyable by him admitting that he likes mommies as a class of people. For example, my friend Erin, who dotes on him frequently and takes time to listen to his long drawn out stories when we’re leaving chu ..read more

   It is with much sadness that I write that we had to let Pepper go today. I was “her person” for almost 18 years. She has lived in three apartments and one full house with us, enjoyed 10 years of peace and leisure with us before we had children, and then pleasantly adjusted and accepted our offspring (and our offspring only) to become not like a sister to our kids, but more of a cranky old aunt that lived with us. She will be much missed.    Pepper’s twin sister, Pansy, had her health take a very sudden decline in December of 2019 and we had her put down at that time ..read more