Our Dream Kitchen

We may be dreaming about changes to our lake house kitchen but we are already so lucky to have our dream kitchen at home.   We know what it's like to have the perfect kitchen that works for our family.  We also know what it's like to live through a kitchen renovation.  When we bought this house we knew the kitchen was going to have to be rebuilt.  The original kitchen had plywood cabinets that I could barely reach. An old farmhouse sink sitting on a rusty old metal cabinet and hardly any counter space.  The back living room in the house had to be accessed through the bathroom, through a cubby hole in the stairs, or through an adjacent room that is now our play room/art room for the girls.  The laundry was in the downstairs bathroom too and at 9 months pregnant I could barely squeeze between the wall and the washer.   So we decided to do a kitchen addition and open up the back of our house and extend the kitchen to be open with the living room.  All with three kids under the age of 5 and only one of them in school!  Great idea!  We may have regretted it a little bit at the time but looking back we don't regret it now.  It was certainly an adventure!

We don't even have pictures of the kitchen from when we toured the house.
We knew right away that we were going to do a renovation to it.  It was small, dark,
had extremely sloped floor and no counter space.  

Old farmers sink on metal base cabinet.  Plywood cabinets.
I couldn't even reach the second shelf or the handle to open them.  

Not sure why we were all on the floor.  We literally have no pictures of this kitchen!
The stove was in the middle of the room with no counter space near it.
The fridge was on a wall by itself roughly where the photographer of
this picture was standing.  

Living in an antique we were careful about our design choices, we wanted them to be classic and not too trendy so that they wouldn't go out of style.  We wanted the kitchen to reflect our 1790 year old home's style and match with the style of the rooms adjacent to it.  We wanted it to be comfortable, and pretty and to become the heart of our home.   It's been 12 years since we were living with three kids and no kitchen for six months.   A dozen years later and our kitchen at home is still our dream kitchen.  It may be because we designed every inch of the space.  Or it may be because we always thought we'd build and design our own house and when we bought an antique we realized all of our designing capabilities were going to have to go into this one room! Or maybe it's because the chaos we lived through makes us appreciate the kitchen even more!

The girls were so little they don't really remember. 

Our make shift kitchen in dining room.  They were hammering
away on the other side of that plastic. 

We bumped out the back of the house to add more space
 in the kitchen and add actual doors to our yard.  Before that there was access to the yard from the house.  You had to go out front door or through two doors in the garage to get to the yard.  

The interesting thing is that many of the design styles we chose 12 years ago because they are classic are becoming more and more trendy.  Several of our friends have done kitchen additions over the past couple of years and have added white cabinets, farmhouse sinks, stainless appliances, and stainless drawer pulls and knobs.  A friend just redid her kitchen this year and even picked the same exact color cabinets as us without realizing it.

They were so little and so amazed by all the changes at the end of each day.  

The old kitchen was stripped down to nothing.  A new door to the garage was added.
We actually had access to our yard!

Progress! Walls and the coming together of a kitchen.  The days when no one came
were the hardest.  If I didn't have a kitchen I wanted to hear work being done on the
other side of that plastic!

The best thing about our kitchen is not that it is still in style or becoming more trendy but that after 12 years WE still love it.  It is still our dream kitchen.  It works well for our family of 5, 7 if you include our two labs, who are always in the kitchen with us.  It is the biggest room in our house by far but it works because that is where everyone hangs out.   There is a large space that felt too big between the island and the table which soon became the stage for the kids to perform after dinner, is a great spot for extra people when we are having parties and get togethers.   The kitchen truly is the heart of our home.    The issue is we sometimes have trouble getting folks to leave the kitchen and relax in the living room or the dining room.  Everyone wants to just stay in our kitchen!   Here are just a few of the design choices we made that we still love and enjoy 12 years later.

Our backsplash.  This is Rod's baby.   We designed this kitchen back before there was pinterest so we poured over kitchen magazines and had a manila folder filled with ideas and ripped out magazine pages of things we liked.  Rod saw this backsplash in a magazine, loved it, couldn't find the source so he called the magazine to find out where they had gotten it and ordered it up.  Stainless steel tiles reflect the colors around it while still looking good with the antique style of the rest of the kitchen.  (The pot filler has actually given us some issues and has been expensive to repair and still leaks a bit so while it is nice to fill large pots at the cooktop it has not been our favorite choices.)

For me my baby was the hood and the sink and....the window seat!  I saw a kitchen design with a hood with a large mantel with corbels and had to have it.  When we ordered our kitchen I found all the pieces in our cabinet style to have our kitchen installer custom build our hood from trim pieces and corbels.  I still love the design all these years later and of course like switching decor on display up there.  Rod's rooster always stays.  It's said that a rooster in the kitchen brings good luck to your home.   I guess we're not taking any chances.  Except at Christmas time. Santa takes over the kitchen mantel at that time of year.

Our appliances.  Rod was working on a project for work with high end appliances so he picked all of these.   I rolled my eyes but went with it.  I have to say we have had very few issues and we love them all.  My favorite is the side by side Sub-zero!  So much storage in the fridge and freezer.   We love having 6 burners on our Wolf cook top and our double ovens come in handy year round! And our Bosch dishwasher with a cabinet cover so it matches the island is so quiet you can't even tell it's running.  Guests actually have trouble finding our dishwasher.  That was a must after we couldn't hear each other talk when our old dishwasher was running.

Our bench seat.  My mom and dad put one in when they added a kitchen addition when I was a little girl.  I slept there on hot nights, did my homework there, had friends over and have so many memories in that window seat.  My girls and their friends love ours.  They think it's so cool that we have a "couch" in our kitchen!  My favorite part is that my mom and I made the covers for the cushions and the coordinating curtains with dragonflies peeking out.  A labor of love for sure.  The seat cushion needs to be replaced soon because it's getting worn down from all the wear but I'm flipping it over and making it work because I love it so much.  The shelf behind it was actually a mistake.  They built the space too big.  Even with cushions peoples feet never would have been able to reach the ground.  So we added the shelf which has secret storage below (that we don't use, but we could!) and it's a great spot to keep plants happily growing year round.

Funny I looked through hundreds of pictures of our kitchen and none of them had our sink in it.
It is always full of dishes so not exactly the perfect backdrop for a photograph but I love it just the same.  

Our farmhouse sink.  Who knew something so old would become so trendy.  Our kitchen already had one and although it was big and clunky and we knew we wanted to replace it with something with a similar antique farmhouse feel.   I fell in love with one with an intricate design on the front.  It was only available in a smaller size so we found this one by Kohler that we could pick and add our own tiles to the front of it.  I love the deep basins...all of our children have had baths in that sink!

Our granite has hints of gray and purple and green.  Still our favorite colors.  We love the design and pattern.  Now that the new finishes of leather granite are coming out we find that we prefer that in our friend's kitchens but we still love our choice.   It is so us! And we love granite.  I love being able to put items right off the cook top or out of the oven onto the granite without worrying about leaving a mark on the surface.  It is durable for a family with many art projects and cooking projects being done on a weekly basis on our large island.

Our kitchen sign of all the places we've been that are near and dear to our hearts.  I gave it to Rod for our 15th anniversary.  The only places we'd add now is Crescent Lake & Puerto Rico.  And this year Hawaii for our 20th!  Apparently the etsy seller that made ours is taking a short break but here is the link to her page if anyone is interested in emailing her.  https://www.etsy.com/listing/63762255/going-down-memory-lane-create-your-own

Our appliance garage.  With an old house we were working around some intersesting space issues and ended up with an empty space that my dad suggested we turn into a narrow pantry from the hallway.  The appliance garage slides up and down like a garage and gives us space to keep flour, sugar, and appliances we use frequently hidden and out of sight. It is a pretty design feature that hides things you want to have close at hand and best utilizes some extra space from our bonus pantry.

Our kitchen aid.  You may not know this about us but we are a kitchen aid family.  Every one of our family members has one and my mom and Mark even have one in Maine.  We had one growing up that my dad made a pull out cabinet for.  It had several heights so it could be lower for my brother and I to bake and higher for my mom and dad to use.   It is sentimental to me because so many memories of your childhood are around food, your kitchen and baking.   We have given one as a wedding gift to all our family members and ours came from my mom and Mark.  We leave our kitchen aid on our counter as it is something we use on almost a daily basis for cookies, brownies, mashed potatoes, cupcakes, just about everything!  We all have our eyes on a turquoise one for the lake!






Our coffered ceiling.  This is one design element that was in our original kitchen (although we don't seem to have a picture of them!) that we were sad they had to tear out.   It was the one original design element that I wanted to make sure we kept in the addition.  That being said it was the last detail to be completed because it was all complicated trim work.  We were tired of having no kitchen, tired of lugging our dishes to the upstairs bath tub to wash them with 3 kids (ages 4 1/2, 2 and 6 months), tired of having construction workers in our house on a day to day basis.  But I knew if we didn't add the coffered ceiling back to this kitchen it would be the biggest regret we had.  I didn't want to take it out in the first place but to not add it to the new kitchen when it was such a stunning part of our original kitchen and an architectural element that helped us fall in love with this home it would have been a shame.   We are so glad we added it back even though it meant a few more weeks of construction.

Our sky lights.  I love the sound of rain and snow on our sky lights.   Today as I'm blogging the snow and rain mixture is falling on the skylights and blanketing the room in a layer of snow.   On a sunny day it adds so much light to our north facing kitchen and on a snowy day the sound is so peaceful.  The skylights really are what bring the outdoors into our kitchen.  They make you want to venture outside onto our patio and when you are inside doing dishes or cooking you feel like you are experiencing the weather outside!  


What I love about our kitchen is that we really did plan every single corner of it to work for us.  Someone else might move in here someday and wonder why we put something where we did.  It works for us because we planned every single cabinet and drawer in our kitchen as we were designing it.   We have a baking area with a drawer for measuring cups, with a cabinet for baking pans below it and spices next to it and a tall cabinet for cookie sheets.  Above that we store the kitchen aid on the counter and have the appliance garage for sugar and flour and other baking needs.  We planned a dish area of the kitchen with all that we need to set the table and put away leftovers that is equidistant from the kitchen and the dining room.  We have a pantry in the kitchen and another one for extra storage in the hall.  We added an office area near the kitchen table that is really used for the kids art supplies and our every day essentials.  It just works, for us!

A picture from soon after the kitchen was finished.

The kitchen has been a few shades of green before we settled on the gray it is now.  The good thing about creamy white cabinets is they go with anything.  The wall color is the easy part of the kitchen to change.   In the future we might consider a few other changes.  We think the small granite backsplash looks dated although it is not a top priority as it is hidden in most places in the kitchen.  And we would consider painting our island a light gray and adding more visual interest to the ends of the island at some point as it takes a little more abuse in the middle of the room.  We would also consider new lights.  Or light covers.   We always wanted school house lights but just couldn't justify the expense at the end of this big addition and kitchen renovation.  Funny thing is when we look in lighting catalogs we still like school house lights.  Just goes to show you that you should trust your gut and go with what you love because a dozen years from now you will probably still love it!!