Kitchen Chaos

Ever since we moved into our house I have had a love/hate relationship with my kitchen. I love the size, how open it is to the rest of the house, how there's enough room to cook and still have a baby or two playing in the floor... The appearance, however, has been a thorn in my side for the past 4 years! The people who owned our house previously had very eclectic tastes to put it mildly. I think we counted 10 different colors of paint on the downstairs level alone...not all attractive or coordinating. How can we forget the HUGE bronze and black star on the ceiling of the dining room or the little stars painted on the tile on the fire place? We had about a 6 week leeway from the time we closed on our house to the time that our apartment lease was up. We used every bit of this time to repaint almost the entire house! The kitchen had 5 different colors in it alone so it took a lot of time. One paint I couldn't get rid of was the paint on the tile backsplash. That's right....they painted the tile! Poorly I might add. Every few squares across the tile backsplash, was a streaky, red painted tile. The paint was in the grout and deep red so there was no hope of removing it like we did on the fire place. Once we repainted the house the kitchen looked decidedly yellow and ugly. I had a seam in the formica that was bubbled and a kitchen faucet that was faded and funky looking. Anyway, we had other things that commanded more immediate attention like setting up Joshua's nursery so the kitchen fell to the back burner. Then we ended up building a grape arbor over the back patio to get rid of the previous covering that sustained hail damage, put plantation shutters up, and found out I was pregnant with Lily. That necessitated a remodel in study, big kid furniture for Joshua....the list goes on.

Anyway, a few weeks ago I struck a bargain with Eric. I had told him once that I should get jewelry for every gun he bought (ha ha). I've yet to see any sparkly things come my way and our house has accumulated a substantial gun collection. I traded in my jewelry for my kitchen! It all came together pretty fast. I had them out for an estimate 2 weeks ago, they were out the Monday after to cut templates and last weekend I said "Ciao" to my yellow kitchen! I have spent most of my time since they finished dusting... It's amazing how much dust cutting granite can create and they did most of the cutting before they got here and the polishing outside! I think I will be finding granite dust for a very long time! I finally got my kitchen all back together Monday night and I love it. When your kitchen is torn up the whole rest of the house might as well be in shambles. I can't tell you how many times I started to go to dump something or rinse something in the kitchen sink when I had no sink to do these things! It was a LONG two days with two kids and no kitchen sink. I think I've had my fill of eating out for quite some time!