… a month into purchasing the Benjamin Jacob’s house, if I were being completely honest, most days it was all getting to be a bit much. We were using half the upstairs bathroom as a kitchen, each morning I would awkwardly bump into contractors before I had laid hands on coffee or a bra, and my personal favorite – each week I hauled 6 people’s worth of dirty clothes, sheets and towels to a local laundromat and then patiently waited and waited and waited. I posted the above from a laundromat on one such evening. What kept me going? Ah, that most beautiful of events called The World Cup. At this point, the bedrooms were all painted and inhabited, so I was painting the front living rooms. I fondly remember this project above all others, preoccupied, half listening to and half watching the World Cup games while screaming for the underdogs, cursing at the refs for their numerous bad calls – and all in all, embracing the new found distraction with open arms.

A couple of weeks later, we did finally have laundry on the second floor (halle-frickin-lujah!!), which meant our contractor could return his efforts to the kitchen. He did a beautiful job tying the new hardwood floors into the old, and getting everything in place. And as the custom cabinets from Joe Giunta’s Fine Woodworking got installed with the new appliances, the kitchen really started to feel like it was coming together. And if I can take a second to gloat, the decision to take down the wall was absolutely genius!

The countertops were a particularly difficult decision. In our last house, we had sprung for soapstone, which I had loved, loved, loved. But given the mounting expenses, I had to find a more affordable option. I’m not a huge fan of granite or the more brittle stones, like marble, so decided to hunt for a warmer alternative. After more hours than should have been spent on home improvement websites, I finally found Craft Art in Georgia, who would ship us unfinished black walnut countertops at an amazing price. Joe helped us to create a high-end edge, making the whole look better than I could have imagined.

Even though we still had a ways to go, by this point the kitchen truly felt like the heart of our home. We took the bay window area and made that into a breakfast nook with lots of comfy cushions, and we recreated the paneled finish around the bar area to have the same look as the original paneling that is around the doorway into the kitchen and also around the arch out to the bay.