The never-ending to-do list...

DH spent Saturday installing the gas logs in our fireplace. It's wonderful to flip a switch on the wall and have a fire in the fireplace. I have used it often since he finished installing it...

And the weather outside made it all the nicer to have a fire in the fireplace. We had snow flurries all day Saturday and Sunday, but fortunately only a bit of it stuck to the ground.
DH's other project for the weekend was to work on the broom closet. The builder only had one shelf in the closet and it doesn't hold much. DH will add a couple of more shelves for cleaning supplies, an outlet for plugging in chargers for phones, etc. (he actually installed it before I shot this photo), and an outlet to plug my Swiffer sweeper vac into to charge it.
While he was at the store to get a longer pipe to install the gas logs, he picked up a couple of thin sheets of metal to put in the bottom of my spice drawers to keep the magnetic tins from sliding around.
DD asked me to take some photos of her room and post them so her friends at college can see her room, so here they are. There are still a couple of piles of things laying around that didn't go back to college with her.
The dresser and closet side of the room and the all-important golf ball collection...
The desk area and entrance to her room...
The bookcase...
For those following the saga of the hunting blind that someone set up on our property, we still haven't seen any sign of the owner. The winds were strong on Saturday, so the blind collapsed but didn't blow away because it is staked into the ground. Gun season for deer hunting begins the Monday following Thanksgiving here in PA, so my guess is that he set up the blind early to stake out his territory. He'll be really surprised when he comes back to hunt and finds the Posted signs that we've hung up around our property!
A good part of this weekend was spent searching online for some stools for the bar in the kitchen/family room. I sent DH a long list of possibilities and he sent back a list of his 3 favorites. This one is the Tommy stool - I was a bit worried that the legs on this one would mar the wood floors and they were so narrow at the bottom it wasn't obvious that felt pads would work on the legs...
This one is the Hillsdale Cierra stool. Part of the problem with all the stools we looked at was the risk that the reds wouldn't coordinate with the red chairs that we already have in the room in front of the fireplace. They came in other colors, so the second dilemma was trying to decide on color.
We finally decided on this stool. It is the Hillsdale Venus stool and we bought 4 of them for the kitchen bar area. The online reviews were very good - very well made, sturdy, and comfortable...
I think this stool is really fun, but DH didn't care for it. Maybe I'll get it for my sewing studio. I'm planning to get a stool to sit on at my cutting table while I work on my scrapbooking. I need to get the counter-height cutting table in there first, then a 26" stool should work well.
I spent Saturday doing some cleaning and cutting shelf liner to fit the shelves and drawers in my kitchen. I didn't do all of the cupboards, but wanted to get the ones done that might get water or dirt on them. I mainly did the cupboards where I store my glassware and the drawers where I store my spices.

I also worked on a set of placemats that I'm making for our family room table. I finished one last week and yesterday I almost finished a second one. It may be a while before I get all 6 of them done! The embroidery takes 45 minutes to an hour per placemat and the handstitching around the embroidery takes about an hour per placemat. I hate handstitching, but it really adds to the details on the placemat. Photos to come later...

Home again, home again...

Sorry to be MIA for a couple of days, but I drove my mom back to Northern New York State yesterday (8 hours) and drove back home today.

On Tuesday, while Mom was still here, we tackled some of the sewing studio unpacking. I forgot to take "before" photos, so these are "in progress" photos. This is the larger side of the room...
and the smaller side of the room...
The closet is filling up fast! I'll have to rearrange things after I get everything unboxed.
Mom was the expert box opener and made short order of breaking down the boxes after they were empty...
The landscapers finished the second seatwall (on one side, at least)...
They also worked on extending the exposed aggregate concrete that will be around the pool so there will be a strip of it along the edge of the pavers.

There was a gorgeous sunset on Tuesday night...
Must have been the calm before the storm...
On the way home from NYS, I stopped at the Grove City outlets to pick up some spice tins from Pfaltzgraf. I was planning to order them online, but the shipping charge was so outrageous I decided to stop at the outlets sometime to pick some up. I didn't get quite enough, so I'll have to get back up there sometime and buy more for my baking spices. These are my cooking spices, all labeled and in their tins and in the drawer near the cooktop...
The edge of the covers on the tins have both sprinkle and pour areas and there are magnets on the bottom of the tins. I'm going to have DH find me a piece of metal to fit the drawer so the spice tins will stay where I put them.
While I was gone, the landscapers finished putting the stone on the second seat wall and then grouted both seat walls. The concrete around the pool wasn't able to be poured because of the rain. The wood for the deck and the pavers have arrived, so they can work on those next week.

DH spent a couple of hours replacing the white outlets and switches on the granite backsplash in the kitchen with black outlets and switches - what a huge improvement! I didn't get a photo yet. He didn't get enough, so I'll wait and take a photo after they are all changed to black.

Kitchen design changes and granite

I met with our kitchen designer (KD) on Thursday to discuss the kitchen design. I've been reading the kitchen forum on the Garden Web a lot lately and, thanks to all the people who post there, I realized I didn't know the answers to some very important questions about our new kitchen. I also needed to let our KD know that I wanted to change the island to one level instead of the two levels that were in the design originally.

This is the original design of the kitchen. I kept most of the perimeter cabinets the same, although some of them have been changed to drawer stacks instead of regular base cabinets.
The cabinets in the island are now a bit odd in their shape! Here is a sketch I made of the new island configuration...There was a question a while ago on the Garden Web kitchen site that asked what people regretted most about their kitchen remodels. Many of the respondents said that they wished they had gone through everything in their current kitchens and decided exactly where everything would be stored in the new kitchen layout. So, to avoid regretting the same thing later, I made a list of my new cabinets and tried to figure out where everything in my current kitchen will live in the new kitchen.

I'm also really trying to keep the clutter off my counters in the new house. That means I need a way to lift the heavy stand mixer and the food processor out of the cabinets. The solution is to put appliance lifts in two of the island cabinets. The KD said that the cabinets need to have a minimum 24" depth for the appliance lifts, so there will be one 24" deep cabinet on the baking side of the island for the mixer, and another on the cooking side of the island (opposite the cooktop and oven) for the food processor. That leaves an 18"x24" deep 3-drawer stack on the baking side of the island - top drawer is for baking spices and utensils, and the middle and bottom drawers are for mixing bowls, 9x13" pans, pie pans, etc. - and a narrow 18"x12" base cabinet beside it. Beside the food processor cabinet will be a long, narrow base cabinet, 36"x12" where I'll store casserole dishes (and other as-yet-undetermined stuff).

I was having a terrible time figuring out where to store my spices. I've finally decided to store them in drawers (after seeing many photos on Garden Web of spice drawers). I changed the cabinet to the left of the cooktop to a stack of drawers so I can store cooking spices in the top drawer and pots and pans in the lower drawers. The baking spices will go in a drawer in the island. Here are some photos of spices stored in drawers:

On Friday, DH and I had an appointment to look at granite at the fabricator's that our KD uses. We have decided to go with the Verde Butterfly for the kitchen and Tsunami for the master bathroom vanities. I have never heard of Tsunami and suspect there may be another name for it. The photo we took doesn't show the depth of color very well.


Here is the Verde Butterfly... And here is the Tsunami...

This week it's time to attack all the stuff in my sewing room/craft room and get a lot of it packed up. Last week I packed up a lot of things from the kitchen and dining room that I can get along without until after we move (canning jars, a bunch of cookbooks, candles, etc.). I'm typing the contents of the boxes into my laptop as I pack the boxes, then printing out the labels, and taping the list right to the top of the box. It takes a bit longer to get the boxes packed, but will be worth it when I'm looking for something that hasn't been unpacked and there are a million boxes sitting around!