Yay.

You guys, I just spent 10 minutes trying to find a gif of Julie Andrews spinning on a mountaintop. I failed to find a version that would be appropriate for this, a family-safe blog, so please just picture that image in your head, because that is how I feel about the kitchen.

I haven't been the greatest at posting updates of each step. The last you saw, just the lower cabinets were in.

Then came the uppers. Then, skip ahead a zillion steps or so...

... now we have flooring, countertops, appliances and lighting, i.e., pretty much a FUNCTIONING KITCHEN, whaaatttt?! There are still a lot of odds and ends to be done (the hood, more electrical work, trim, and one of our cabinets needs to be swapped out because the shelf brackets don't align properly) but yeah, things are good. 

Total honesty, though: Eric was home when they installed the counters on Thursday, and he sent me this photo when I was at work and I had a quiet inner freakout and started questioning everything. It just all looked so foreign. Especially the new floor juxtaposed with the old. The new floor is cork, and we picked a dark color because we didn't want it to look like we had tried to match the old hardwood and failed. But this photo just looked so strange and off to me! Then I got home and saw it in person and it was fine. I think it just takes a few days (and seeing it in the flesh, not a photo) for your brain to adjust to changes like these.

The whole thing made me remember this post from Young House Love a couple weeks ago (yes, I will be referring to YHL pretty much constantly) about how "the middle makes no sense." Even now, the whole space looks very cool (as in not warm) but I keep telling myself that after we add paint, window treatments and accessories and actually start LIVING in the space it will all come together.

I think paint will go a long way toward unifying the two halves of the room. It will be a happy day when we get rid of this lime green. Soon the action will start on the other side of the room, where we're having a bench built in under the bay window (it's the law!) and a desk built in on the wall by the door. 

 Eric has a good friend who works for a stone distributor, so we actually got a bit of a hookup on our countertops. The granite we chose is called Coast Green, and it's in a honed finish instead of polished. It always looks more gray in photos than it does in person. 

We lived without an oven for four and a half months, so now we're overcompensating with TWO. I'm psyched about this thing. If you're just baking one thing the little oven on top preheats faster and is more energy efficient. Or if it's Thanksgiving and you need to do things at different temps, no more noodling around trying to figure out the best way to split the difference. Every time I've lived somewhere with an oven that has one of those bottom storage drawers, I put something like a muffin tin in there and then forget that drawer exists and six months later I'm like, "Where's that stupid muffin tin?" So now, no drawer. MOAR OVEN. 

When our contractor gave us the initial schedule that said they'd be done by mid-December I thought, pshyeahhh, right. Meanwhile it was determined that we'd host Christmas for my family, so I started preparing everyone for takeout from Buca di Beppo. But... like... this is real now! I have a Christmas dinner to plan!