Pendant lights

Since we are on a roll blogging I thought I'd tell you about our pendant lights.

When we re-did the kitchen Christa decided she wanted an island with pendant lights over it. My dad was so kind to help us with our lighting and we couldn't have done it without him.

We shopped and shopped- first buying a set of lights at Home Depot.  After a while we decided they were too expensive and someone (me) wasn't sold on them.  Christa was patient with me and we ended up buying some from Ikea.  I wasn't sold on them either but we saved a considerable amount of money by switching to them.  Finally, we returned those lights too and we just bought a basic pendant cord without a fixture on it (something like this but I think it was a little cheaper than what is listed).

This summer Christa became a real garage sale master and found a lot of fun things.  She found some oversized mason jars and we turned them into our pendant lights.  We saved money, it was very easy to do, and it took us less than an hour.

(I'm not very good at photographing lights.  This is the best you are going to get for now.)

 We added some expensive vintage light bulbs to finish the look.  

Now we just need to finish the island that will go under the lights so I stop hitting them with my head when I walk by. 

Oh, and we have two of the cutest little girls ever. 

Kitchen Floor

In the last post I promised an update for the kitchen floor so try not to be bored.

The old floor was a golden oak - not a color we wanted to duplicate after we installed the new flooring.  We were hoping for more of a dark walnut look. 

 I took the time to cut out the old floor at different levels so it would look like it was always one continuous floor.

Sanding was not very fun.  At all. 

 Judging by these pictures you would think that Christa did all of the work.  And you would be right.  That Christa is amazing.

We really like how it turned out.  

 Before

After

Pantry

It has been a long time since we have updated our blog.  Since that time we have finished our floor and we are really happy with it.  More on that another day.  The thing that has changed our house the most in the past few weeks is the addition of a real pantry.

Remember that when we bought the house we did so with the intention of opening up the kitchen into the dining room.  We felt it was better to have a large kitchen with a good sized eating area than to have a small kitchen with a tiny table and have a separate dark, carpeted dining room.

View from family room

View from living room

This is the original pantry.  It wasn't very big and since we tore out a wall we needed a place for our refrigerator. So we needed a new pantry(and a bigger one if possible).

This is what we came up with

We went from this...

To this

We sure like it. What do you think?