11/21/04: Lost some momentum, but the kitchen looks great

[davidlevine]

Word count: 118693 | Since last entry: 672 | This month: 6511

So much for writing every day in November. I just missed two days in a row, and only got any writing in today through sheer cussedness (200 words during intermission at the symphony).

But the kitchen looks gorgeous -- we spent most of the weekend shopping and unpacking. We have most of the pots and pans in place, all of the spices, and most of the sauces. We bought a very nice teak step stool (necessary now, because we've made all the cabinets taller to compensate for the decreased width that gives us more elbow room) and a gorgeous, gorgeous bamboo cutting board which will live on the granite countertop because it is so very pretty. But we gave up on finding the telephone we wanted locally and ordered it from the web.

Okay, I admit it -- I am a good little consumer. New posessions make me happy. But we've also put a lot of old stuff in the "garage sale" box as we've been unpacking.

There has been much discussion of the question "where does this want to live?" for various objects -- we can't put everything back where it was in the old kitchen -- and all the answers are provisional and subject to change. But the new layout is very, very practical; it works exactly the way we hoped it would when we laid it out, as we found when we prepared fried rice tonight. Kate was easily able to reach the spices without getting in my way at the stove. Also, the bright halogen lighting in the new stove hood makes everything on the stove look delicious and wonderful. I feel like I'm in a cooking show. We have never had any kind of lighting over the stove, believe it or not, and have been cooking in our own shadows as long as we've been together.

Comments

[calimac.livejournal.com]

Congratulations on a successful kitchening.

The question "where does this want to live?" is in our case overwhelmed by the problem, "We know where this wants to live, but there is no space for it." This is not much of a problem for kitchen hardware, except for those that say "I want to live on the overcrowded counter," but it does occasionally appear after a large grocery shopping, and it most emphatically applies to books.

[davidlevine]

Well, that's an issue for us too. We did go through a planning exercise of "what goes where" as part of the cabinet design, but we've found that some objects don't fit where we intended them to go (yes, even when we're only half-unpacked, some spaces are already full). So when asking an object "where do you want to live?" part of the answer is always "someplace where I can fit." This does sometimes involve asking other objects if they might be happier elsewhere.

It's tough, negotiating with one's posessions...

[ssprince.livejournal.com]

Everything wants to live on my cutting board. Now the pottery (raw) wants to move into the kitchen too.