Friday, May 29: Overthinking the Back Stairwell

What is even happening. I have been so busy this blog has been sadly ignored. That's unlike me and I blame it 100% on the kitchen chaos. It is still not done. It is close, but it is not done. And it is hard, very hard, to feel like I am organized and have a handle on things when I have nowhere to lay out my planner, collect important documents, leave notes to myself, find a pen, grab a box cutter, etc etc etc. I'm talking, of course, about a kitchen desk, one of my non-negotiable pieces of this kitchen renovation. I miss my kitchen desk desperately. Mournfully. I never had a kitchen desk until moving into this house, and I couldn't give it up when we planned the renovation. I rely on it. Where even is my planner right now? Attic? Basement? Bench by the front door? It's anyone's guess. 

The other thing on my kitchen desk is my home, non-work Chromebook. This has been where I type up my blog each morning or evening. It's right there in the kitchen, easy to just flip open and type on. For a brief time, I did have my Chromebook in the basement, but then Lucia broke her own Chromebook and had to appropriate mine for a few months until we bought her a MacBook in preparation for SAT prep this summer. So in order to write my blog I have to find my work computer, find a place to put it, sometimes venture across four floors to find my work bag, etc. Or write it at work, which is usually what ends up happening, unless my work day is very busy, which it often is.

The kitchen! Needs! To! Be! Finished!

The kids have just 3 full days of school next week, then a brief school day on Thursday before they're done for the summer. It's time. We're all kind of done with this year. Ready for summer. Ready to have real meals again, sitting around a table that isn't in the basement. Ready to not be in the basement. 

The renovation is terrible but pieces of it are fun, like when I met with our designer this week to select wallpaper for the back stairwell. This stairwell was always just kind of dark and unused, as back stairwells tend to be, but with the walls we knocked down, it's now an actual part of the entrance to the kitchen. Of course, being me, I wanted to keep that old-house, back-stairwell feeling, so when our designer asked what kind of wallpaper I wanted, I rattled off a long list of things like squirrels, deer, foxes, meadows, forests. And she found a perfect paper! Dark forest with some stags here and there. It reminds me of the 1982 edition of the Ravensburger game Enchanted Forest, or, in some ways, The Twelve Dancing Princesses Little Golden Book 1954 edition illustrated by Sheilah Beckett. Love love love. It's dark and a little creepy. I also chose a sconce for the stairwell that is a golden hand holding the base of a lightpost. (I say "I", and Andrew did tell me I could pick whatever wallpaper and sconce I wanted, but he is also fully enamored with these choices, or so he says.)

It's little details like these that are going to make this kitchen a true reflection of who we are. (It's also little details like these that are going to push the budget into the stratosphere.)