a room to cook and eat

welcome to our kitchen.  it's yet another one of my favourite rooms in our house.  especially since i'm  the resident chef.  from the time we started building to its completion, it's been a favourite.  it's so much bigger than our kitchen in our last house, which was a galley style and didn't have a lot in the way of storage.  now we've got so much storage that some of the upper cabinets right at the ceiling are empty.  that might also be because there's no way i could ever reach anything in them without a ladder. 

we i had a hard time deciding what colours to choose for our kitchen in this house.  our first house had light cabinets and dark counters/back splash and we knew we didn't want to repeat the same look.  so i turned to pinterest for inspiration.  i looked at grey cabinets, dark cabinets with light counters, a combination of dark cabinets on the bottom and white for the uppers, and all white cabinets with white counters.   in the end i really love what we ended up with.  and even though there are times when i wish we had gone with a white island, i remember why we just went with all one colour.  we didn't want our kitchen to end up looking dated too quickly.  that's kinda why we also chose to go with a marble subway tile rather than something flashy.  speaking of tile, we need to fix the tile around the windows by the kitchen sink.  the way it is now, it just ends at the edge of the cabinet instead of going right to the window.  something i didn't catch until it was too late.  whatev's, just another project for us to tackle.  i've always wanted to learn how to tile. 

on the subject of appliances, i'm totally love the ones we chose, especially the induction cook top.  it seriously boils water in like a minute.  we really took our time and researched the appliances and made sure we didn't cheap out on them.  not that we did in our first house, we just didn't do any homework before we chose those ones.  for example, a quiet dishwasher was mandatory for this house.  eh-hem children are often sleeping around here when it's running.  we also wanted to have matching appliances and went with the same make for our fridge, dishwasher and oven/microwave combo.  all are electrolux.  the one exception is our induction cook top and for that we went with bosch because it was a better design than the electrolux one.  

here's the progress of our kitchen as we were building.  because it's connected to the family room, i once again remember thinking how huge the space was once the drywall went in.  of course none of the cabinets, appliances, or counters were in; so really it was just a big open empty space.

and here's where our kitchen is now.

the best feature of our kitchen and my one of my wish list requests, is our walk-through pantry.  so awesome to have it connected to the garage and mudroom.  we also put a small deep freeze in our pantry.  never really thought we'd need another freezer but somehow it's always full.  gotta' give credit to rob for that one.  props to you husband.

there are a few things that we'd like to add/change/do in our kitchen/nook/pantry to make them more "ours."  we've already started our painting project in our eating area.  it looks so good already, one more coat of paint left.  we're also looking at doing the following things too:

~ roman shades for the kitchen windows by the sink

~ curtains in the eating area

~ paint the eating area

~ new chairs for the table, white eiffel chairs

~ a walnut top for our table, it's currently a wood base with a veneered top

~ fix the back splash tile

~ possibly paint the pantry and definitely organise it

~ change the light fixture in the pantry

~ find something fun to go above our message board

~ and cook many dinners, make lots of lunches and mange mange (eat eat)