Started

We said goodbye to the blue desk over the weekend.

It's not gone for good-- it just won't be in the kitchen anymore.  

We didn't have anything up on Saturday night... so Doug figured there was no time like the present to start working on the kitchen!  I-- of course-- totally agreed.  So he made a trip out to the shop and three hours later came back with the lower cabinet boxes we are installing along the open wall where the blue desk used to sit.

The plan for that wall is something like this...

via pinterest

There will be a run of lower cabinets that are the same depth as uppers.  We don't have quite enough room for full depth lower cabinets along that wall so we're going to keep them the shallow.  Originally we had planned on doing an entire wall of closed pantry type cabinets but it makes sense to have a run of lower cabinets with a narrow stretch of countertop that can be used for setting out food and drinks when we entertain larger crowds of people.  Even though these cabinets and countertop will not be very deep-- I think they will add so much storage space to my tiny kitchen.  

Instead of having glass doors on the uppers, we're going for a combination of open and closed storage.  This was my inspiration...

from Style at Home via pinterest

I love how crisp and fresh this kitchen is-- it's got a lot of classic touches (white, subway tile, marble) but has a clean modern feel.  That's what I want.

So after an evening of work-- the lower cabinet boxes were finished.  Yesterday afternoon Doug quickly installed them-- with a little help :)

Yup, that's my four year old wielding a drill.  He actually did a pretty good job-- although his little four year old arms got tired quickly holding that drill up!  Caleb's next job was to stick on all the fastcaps over the screws... a perfect job for a four year old.  Caleb can hardly wait to help Daddy finish "fixing" the kitchen.

So after a couple hours of work I've got some shelves in the kitchen where the blue desk used to sit.

The next job is to build and install the upper cabinets for this wall.  Once that is finished we're going to start ripping out some of the cabinets on the other side of the kitchen.  This wall of cabinets will hold all our kitchen stuff while we demo the rest of the kitchen.  The doors for these cabinets won't be ready for a while yet-- so it's going to be interesting storing most of my kitchen essentials on "open" shelves.  I can only imagine how much fun Emerson is going to have destroying my kitchen when everything is open and accessible :)  In the meantime, I've gotta get me some more storage baskets for those shelves!

So, I can finally say that operation kitchen renovation is officially underway.  I love it!