Young House Love

The counters are in and boy are they better than sliced bread. After months of waiting for a surface to dice upon, any old counter would do. But our sparkling new granite is just the bees knees. And instead of revealing the new counters, we’ve decided to make you wait until tomorrow (when the faucet, sink, and dishwasher will be fully installed) and then post the FINAL BEFORE AND AFTERS! Can you tell we’re excited? But the start of the day wasn’t nearly as thrilling as the end. It was full of the usual trials and tribulations of home improvement. First, when the truck pulled up I thought it was some sort of joke. Check

Our new and improved granite slabs moseyed into town this week and, unlike our last visit to the stoneyard, it was definitely love at first sight. Here’s Sherry gettin’ friendly with our two hunks of Pashmina before they go in for cutting. The best news of the day was that our beautiful new counters are coming home on Tuesday. Score! That means our Home Depot installer can come back on Wednesday to hook up the plumbing and – dare I say it? – our new kitchen will be COMPLETE. ‘Til then, you’ll find us drooling over this photo we snapped of our soon-to-be countertop.

While the majority of America seems to love hoarding and clutter, John and I are lone mice. Or whatever the opposite of a pack rat would be. But there’s a fine line between clean, uncluttered spaces and cold, stark rooms. It’s not an easy assessment to make on your own. But I was able to make an honest evaluation by photographing each of our rooms and then comparing each room in our house to rooms in decorating magazines and favorite furniture catalogs like Pottery Barn, Crate & Barrel and Ballard Designs. I quickly realized that while our rooms were clean and simple, they were severely lacking in the design department. So of course I was

This not having a functioning kitchen thing is getting old. It may sound strange, but we were too lazy to go out to eat tonight. Instead, we mustered the energy to attempt cooking in our counterless and sinkless kitchen. Fortunately, the meal itself (chocolate chip pancakes) was relatively easy to make using a cabinet top as our work surface. We also confirmed that our stovetop still functions after almost 3 months of dormancy. It’s the already annoying task of clean-up that reminds you how frustrating it is to not have a kitchen sink. Let’s just say doing dishes in the bathroom doesn’t exactly inspire me to play chef again anytime soon.