Rainy Monday on our back road

Today was dreary and rainy, but we had a nice cozy day in the house. Julia took a wonderful 3 hour nap, and Sam took a 2+ hour one (although not at the same time--still, it meant some nice one-on-one time for me with each of them). My housework went by the wayside, while I spent some time designing my kitchen on graph paper. That was SO much fun!!! I had been putting it off, not really knowing just how I wanted the cabinets to look. But Jim hopes to make them this winter, and get the kitchen finished (yay!), so he has been suggesting that I make a plan of what I want. As I was falling asleep last night, I asked God to give me a vision for my kitchen. And He did! I was able to come up with a layout that I really like, and even Jim likes it! I got the design ideas for the cabinets from a kitchen that was featured in a Taste of Home magazine a while back. Now I am so excited, and I can't wait to get this room completed!! It will be so cool to have doors on my lower cabinets, and actually have upper cabinets to store more things in, too. Here's a list of what we need to accomplish to finish our kitchen:

* Finish mudding and taping a few areas, then sand
* Prime anything that isn't already primed, and paint all the walls (a light cream color)
* Finish the grout for the tile (about a quarter of the kitchen still needs to be done)
* Make all upper cabinets
* Make doors for lower cabinets (and re-design some of the cabinets to include drawers--right now they are just open shelves)
* Purchase and install new countertops for 2 of the counters (right now we have mismatched "leftover" counters that Jim has acquired from a couple kitchen remodeling jobs)
* Install cabinets and hardware
* Install a strip of 5" square ceramic tile along the wall above the counters for a backsplash
* Add moose and tree "wallies" (wallpaper cut-outs) at intervals above the tile backsplash
* Finishing touches such as light switch and outlet covers, and trim on doorways and window
* Install the pine tongue-and-groove ceiling (someday!)

I'm so happy to finally be able to picture what I want the kitchen to look like. The tops of the cabinets will be quite a bit lower than ceiling height, so I can use them to display things like baskets and other pretty things I've collected. I think the whole room is going to look great, and I'm looking forward to working on this project over the months ahead!

Loving Blogger beta!

I'm having a great time with the new Blogger! The new features are so cool and so easy to use, too. Today I got some of my old posts categorized under "Labels" (down a ways on the sidebar). I'm not going to label every post, but I love having the option to, especially for recipes and such--makes it much easier for searching. I also had fun organizing my links by topics rather than lumped all together as I had them before. I was nervous about switching to Blogger beta, but it went really smoothly and I'm glad I did. :)

Well, I'd better get going for now and get a few more things done this evening before winding down and heading to bed. Hope everyone has a wonderful week!