Preparing for the New Kitchen...

As many readers are aware, we are currently without a kitchen... Since the fire, I cannot tell you how much I miss having a kitchen (missing from the picture above.)  Dining out, has quickly lost its finesse.  The dreaded question of each day has been "What do you want for dinner?"  Ugh... 

Everyone has said, well at least you'll have a brand new kitchen!  They quickly change their tune, when we tell them, we had the kitchen gutted, and completely redone when we bought this house 3 years ago.  In our last house, we had made two renovations in our kitchen before we were bought out by our local airport.  My husband likes to joke, and tell people, "How many women can say they have had 5 kitchens in 7 years?" 

So I have finally decided to give in to the inevitable, and embrace the fact, that I will once again, have a brand, spanking new kitchen.  Learning from past mistakes, made us choose a tile that wouldn't show every little speck of dirt on the floor, so white tiles were now out of the question.  Another big change we are making will be the color of the cabinets...we have dogs, light colored walls, and cabinets, just don't mix with dogs.  So instead we choose Cherry, with Black granite counters, and a black porcelain double bowl sink .  No design, just a simple flat slab front.  Easy cleanup.  I hope. 

Our current problem is only the waiting.  Waiting for the cabinets to come in, waiting for our new appliances to come in.  The waiting, is killing me.  I can picture the new kitchen in my head, and cannot wait to be able to walk into my kitchen, and cook a meal.  I must say though, going with my husband and the girls to go and pick out the appliances after doing some research was quite fun.  Which brings me to my next comment:

 Many people call me the Gadget Queen.  I love gadgets, electronic gadgets, cooking gadgets, computer gadgets, I just love gadgets.  I think I get that from my dad.  Our newest gadget... is our new fridge, that has yet to be delivered.... I cannot wait to get this gadget in place in the kitchen.  Don't know why I am calling the fridge a gadget?  Here it is:

This is a Kitchen Aid, with a full media center right in the door!  We were able to score quite a huge deal on this and the other major appliances, which is really the only reason why we were able to get this model.  With a 4.3" LCD screen, providing ingredient substitutions, unit conversions as well as digital photo uploads, I think we'll be busy for a little while figuring everything out!  This also provides us with an easy one touch button to lock the ice and water dispenser, preventing our English Mastiff from getting ice himself, and with the high energy star rating, we'll be using 20% less energy!

Having the house fire, changed a lot for us.  We are literally getting a fresh start from the ground up.  We have had all our belongings thrown out, so we have to purchase basically everything all over again.  After much discussion, we all agreed, that we needed to slim down on the amount of "stuff" we owned.  We hardly used many items we had.  We had items we had forgotten we had. We had cabinets filled with items we never used, and have vowed not to let the "stuff" dictate our lives.  With that said, bigger consideration has been made on every item we think of buying.  Even down to the smallest purchase.  Like these for instances:

 I like toasters, my husband on the other hand likes the toaster oven.  Rather than having two separate appliances on the counter, cluttering up space, we found this Hamilton Beach Toaster.  It's both, 2 appliances in 1!  What's better than that?  Neither of us has to give up our preference of choice.   How about this one:

 We had a blender, a small food processor, which I loved, and an electric knife for the holidays, when my father-in-law uses it to carve the turkey.  This wonderful little Oster unit is all 3 of those appliances in a single unit!  taking up A LOT less space! 

Now we just need a kitchen to put these items to work!  Fingers crossed, we will have a kitchen by the beginning of September!