Learning to Love my Kitchen

So I hate cooking. Like truly dread it, dislike it, avoid it like the plague. I was reading an article recently on 10 Reasons You Hate To Cook and the author had some good points, though I still would not define "Kale and Garlic" as an easy recipe to try! The issue of cooking is so multi-faceted for me that even those 10 reasons don't quite cover all the reasons I hate to cook. See, what the author fails to recognize is that most people who hate cooking grew up with parents who disliked cooking as well. So people like me grew up on a steady diet of kraft mac-and-cheese, hot dogs, overcooked pork, dry chicken, and rice-a-roni with canned veggies as a side. When that's your experience of food quite honestly you aren't going to like food very much. On top of that I am naturally picky and I don't make any apologies about it anymore. I just don't like certain foods, especially things like Kale or anything German, eww!

My mother-in-law and sister-in-law are total foodies, they love to cook...because they love to eat. They joke that everyone can be separated into those who eat-to-live and those who live-to-eat. I'm an eat-to-live person, my husband is a live-to-eat person. I happily subsisted off of Boca burgers, noodles, rice, sandwiches, fruit, spinach quesadillas, and cereal during college, with the occasional night of pizza or chinese (ordered in of course). I would happily do that again, but I suspect my family wouldn't be as happy.

In an effort to keep the food budget in check and make sure the kids get a balanced diet, I'm trying to focus on the kitchen now. Painting, organizing, stocking the new pantry and refrigerator are all on the list! Then I'll be making a menu plan of sorts, posting it, and hopefully following it.

Our 'before' is a pretty boring, bland, unappetizing kitchen. (this was during construction, it was much nicer before we stashed the old carpet in there, haha!)

It's much better with cute toddlers peeking out of the cabinets though :)

The Bathroom

Can I just say that I am exhausted? This move has been so positive and really we've had a lot of help with everything from painting to moving to installing new plumbing so I could have my washer on the first floor rather than the basement. But still, moving is hard work.

All that hard work is starting to pay off a bit. We're seeing some real progress with the house. For example, we've got the bathroom 90% done! All that needs to be done is to put some frosted stuff on the glass since the old stuff kind of accidentally got chipped off in the prep work for painting.

'before'

'after'

The shower curtain is from Target. That silly frog potty sticking out of the nook is so not our usual kind of thing for the boys; we had started out with a nice, discreet, white potty. But this one is hands-down the best potty for boys to keep the pee in the potty. It's really high and smooth in the front, preventing splashes/aiming mishaps while not being a hazard when they go to stand up (as some of those pee guards can be). It's there for Peter to get used to as he'll be potty training this summer. In the lower left hand corner of the picture you'll see T-rex's step stool (from target). The light switches in this house are a good 4 feet off the ground so he couldn't reach them, which led to several potty-time meltdowns. The step stool solved the problem and it's discreet enough that the whole bathroom doesn't look like a preschool (minus one very silly frog potty).

You can't see this in the 'before' pics (sorry about that) but we got a new toilet seat, toilet paper holder, and hand towel ring. The seat was one of those soft ones that always seem such a hygiene issue to me, yuck! And the toilet paper holder was wood, also a germ-fest in my opinion. As for the hand towel ring, I love these. We've had hooks (prone to falling off) and bars (little kids can't put it back on properly) but the simple ring towel holder hung low enough for little hands is ideal, it looks great no matter what. I have plans to frame out the mirror with white trim, it looks so plain and tired right now.

This little cabinet used to be in our guest room/sewing room but we desperately needed storage in here and it fit so perfectly that we decided I could find something else to use in the dressing/sewing room. These shelves thankfully go all the way up to the ceiling, lots of storage space for our towels and everything.

The Kids' Bedroom

We decided to focus on getting the kids' room all unpacked and set up asap so that they'd have a safe place to play and I could have one room that didn't look like a tornado hit it :) So here it is!

Before:


After:





I'll post more pics soon with detailed descriptions, but basically we've got T-rex on one side and Gizmo's crib on the other. On each side of the bed we have a 9-cube shelf that stores all the boys' toys. The far shelf has Gizmo's toys and the near one behind the door has T-rex's toys.

Just don't look in the closet, I hold no responsibility for that dark pit of disorganization!