Our ‘New’ Kitchen

When we bought our home we instantly fell in love with the kitchen!  The house was only 2 years old and had all of the upgrades that we dreamed about but didn’t think were possible in our first home.  We felt so lucky and I instantly began to promise homemade dinners and many baked goods to my husband.

After about a year of living in the house, still in love with the kitchen, we decided to give it a little pizzazz.  Our first DIY home improvement project, hooray!  The kitchen already had some funky red pendant drop lights, black granite counter tops, stainless steel appliances, but no tile backsplash.   So our mission was to find some complementary tiles that would add a new element of fun and stimulation to our kitchen.   We are head over heels for glass mosaic tiles (in the photo above) with their modern, yet warm feel.  So we bought all of the supplies and drove home very excited, but SUPER nervous.  We had never done anything like this before.  This was in 2009.  Now fast forward to March of 2011, we finally completed our project! Yay us! We procrastinated on this project due to our nervousness; we didn’t want to ruin our kitchen.  But now that this project was a beautiful success,   I am ready for lots more cooking and lots more home improvement projects.

Ok, ok….enough with the suspense and my boring explanation...here is the before photo of the kitchen. Yes, she is beautiful, but with the new face lift, it brings her to a whole new level.



And the after….



I am in love with the single row of tiles along the window.  It is just adorable and I get to look at it every time I wash the dishes!



This new kitchen is giving me a whole new inspiration to my cooking.  I have always been passionate about cooking before, but now I find myself never wanting to leave the kitchen.  I always want to be in there whipping up something delicious (yum… that just made me think of homemade whipped cream),  even after a long day at work when all I want to do is order some take out. 

Here are a few things that help to keep me encouraged, motivated and determined to create a homemade meal for much less money than going out to eat.

1.        I always turn music on.  We have an iPod player in our kitchen and music keeps me dancing and singing around the kitchen while I am working away.  The time goes by so much faster, especially when you are singing along with Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin”

2.       Look for flower sales.  I love to have fresh cut flowers in my kitchen.   They are so cheerful, beautiful and fragrant.  I definitely don’t spend a lot of money on flowers, but during the long winter months of New England it is always nice to have a touch of spring.  You can see I have some daffodils in my kitchen now.   At my local grocery store they were 2 bunches of 10 stems for $3.  I couldn’t resist. 

3.       Keep your favorite cooking utensils and electronics in a central location around where you tend to prep all of your food.  This makes cooking much easier if you keep your cutting knives in the drawer next to where you are always cutting up your veggies, fruit, etc.  It took us a while to understand how we use our kitchen, but after we made a few tweaks to where we stored everything, the flow made much more sense and we didn’t find ourselves constantly walking around to get everything we needed.

And I leave you without a recipe today, but with this gem instead…