KITCHEN THINGS

It's been awhile, so here's a recent photo of the kitchen. I hope you like authenticity, because I didn't bother clearing our snacks from the island or tucking the unsightly things of everyday life out of the way.

The kitchen's really not finished, but it works for now and has decent natural light thanks to the giant front window. Before our Easter guests arrived, we rented an industrial buffer to deep clean the concrete floor. Even with regular vacuuming and steam mopping, the kitchen floor hasn't felt truly clean since approximately three days after it was poured. Considering how much construction gunk has been produced since its installation, the floor was really due for a hardcore scrubbing.

I'm so glad we did it! Now Johnnie can walk around barefoot without my "paranoid mom alert" going off, although now I'm tempted to buy our very own floor buffer, which I'm sure is neither cheap nor easy to store. I also completely love having a floor drain, which made this deep cleaning process much easier.

Things we still need to do in the kitchen:

• Build a real base cabinet for the range area, with counter space on either side.
• Build shelving in the pantry (right now it's just open space)
• Build shelving inside the oven cabinets (again, it's just open space right now)
• Hang the pendant light over the baking table. We have it. We just need to hang it. Pathetic.
• Patch a crack in the floor (a pitfall of concrete even with all precautions taken) and reseal it.

I guess that's not really too much, but most of these are critical organizational tasks. Right now we only have one lonely little drawer, where we keep our flatware -- though the crates under the island are basically drawers, too -- and all our dry and canned foods are crammed together in what limited shelf space we have. I don't believe having a more organized kitchen will make me a better cook, but no longer having to dig around for my ingredients may at least make cooking more enjoyable. That'll be nice.

We'll get there soon enough. A higher priority right now is a railing for the front porch. I'm really thankful we've made it through two winters without anyone falling down our icy stairs with nothing to hold onto. For safety's sake, we're finally getting ready to tackle that little oversight. Alas, it will probably not involve custom ironwork, my preference of course, but oh well. For now I'll settle for nobody tumbling to their doom. You're welcome, family.