Project 64: Black and the New Kitchen

When I saw last week’s color at Project 64 I knew it was the perfect time to get the photos up so you can see our new kitchen–all black and white, with a little red thrown in for accents. We are in love with it, and although it took twice as long as estimated, it is perfect!

I’ll start out with the photo I’m posting at Project 64 which is really a Christmas decoration in the kitchen. I bought this last year and couldn’t believe how perfect is was for the kitchen window when I pulled it out this year. When I bought it, a new kitchen wasn’t even in the planning stage.

And here’s a shot of the full window–the only thing new here is the beautiful tile on the sill that matches the tile backsplash. The old window had lineoleum from the 1950’s.

Anyone who’s been reading the blog for awhile knows our kitchen’s been under construction since the first of August. The kitchen was finished over Thanksgiving, and our red blinds arrived last week. We wanted up and down blinds—these only go down, but new ones have been ordered and we can keep these until they come in. I love the color–though you can only see the tops of them here. This is the only area where we added space (just 14 sq. ft.), but we now have three windows that give us a wonderful view of our lovely street and so much more light than we have anywhere else in the house.

This was my only contribution to the design of the kitchen. We had an old bookcase in this spot in the previous kitchen, and I knew I wanted storage for my cookbooks and a place to display my collection of pitchers. We now have two extra shelves, but I haven’t had the time to put them in yet and rearrange.

An OLD kitchen cupboard used to hang on this wall, and I had to stand on a chair to get almost any of the food stored there. I purchased this chalkboard/memo board from LL Bean and it’s working out wonderfully. I love the new light fixture which I bought from a photograph and had never seen until I got home from our trip out west. We looked at hundreds of light fixtures before I was finally shown this one in a catalog.

This is the right side of the kitchen if you stand with your back to the window. In the old kitchen I had a very small cooktop on the left side of the kitchen and a very small wall oven on this side. Now I have a full-sized stove and I love it. I got two cookie sheets in side by side this weekend. The old oven barely held one! I also have a new full-sized refrigerator which I’ve never had before either.

This is the left side. Now that the cooktop is gone, I have ample counter space. I’m not quite sure how Jack got so many cupboards in the existing space, but it’s amazing to me and to my friends how spacious the new kitchen seems when no additional floor space was added. 

Here’s a shot of my McKenzie-Child teapot–a bit of a splurge, but I’m not sorry. Tracy says I designed the kitchen around it, but it’s not true! It was too perfect, and I already had a couple of small pieces of the same pattern. I used it in an earlier Project 64 post, and several folks asked for a full shot.