New Kitchen Studio

It’s starting to get cold outside and that means two things.  One: eggnog is coming soon to our fridge and two: our kitchen studio is HAPPENING.  Meaning, there are just a few weeks left of calm before our first sample kitchen arrives.  By calm, I mean the time where we’re choosing the countertop samples that will appear in our shop from hundreds of options, finalizing cabinet-hardware suppliers, designing the rest of the kitchen that’s going in the smaller studio space, and finishing up other jobs we’re working on now.

Actually, it may not be a calm next few weeks because our “coming soon” sign is going up.  But we’ll deal with that when it comes, and in the meantime, we are working on training our kids to clean up their messes at home so we can preserve as much peace as possible.

And that’s why we need eggnog to arrive in stores.  It feels like a batch of eggnog coffee cake is long overdue, and this year I’m going to teach our kids how to make it so we can have it whenever we want.  Plus, it means eggnog lattes are coming back and I’ll also have the chance to freeze eggnog in ice cube trays so I can have festive lattes until March.

But back to the kitchen studio.  For the first several months, we’ll be in a smaller space within a big bath showroom while we’re working on our adjacent big space.  Then we’ll be in our own space, which is a 2000-square-foot rectangle at this point with nappy blue carpet.  Our sample kitchen in the smaller space is already space-planned and ordered, except for all the finishing touches, which are my job.  But, since I have so much on my plate right now, I’m waiting until Dave installs the cabinets to choose the countertops, backsplash tile, lighting, and island, which will be a freestanding vintage piece.  And of course, there will be a rug!

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We’re going to be decorating for Christmas early this year!  Like, this week!  We have reasons we can’t yet discuss, but it works out great since we didn’t decorate for fall this year anyway.  Our house was decked out for fall last year, and then again this spring in preparation for our American Farmhouse Style magazine photo shoot in May.  We were so tired of “fall” by May that we didn’t feel that we’d be up for it again starting in late August.  We did inadvertently grow a couple of pumpkins in our yard and bought two at Publix, which ended up being our only fall decor.

(If you saw the picture on Instagram with a “pumpkin spice latte season” piece of art and our pumpkins, that was an illusion.  We had to make a last-minute vignette to make it look like we had decorated for fall, so out came that picture and our yard pumpkins, plus the two from the store).

Anyway, now that it’s cold in the Nashville area and eggnog is coming out any day, we’re more than okay with decorating for Christmas early. Plus, we’ll completely avoid that mid-November mental battle where we’re ready to enjoy Christmas things but feel obligated to keep out turkeys for Thanksgiving.

So, bye bye to this:

And hello to this:

The above picture was actually Christmas at our third house.  It was a brand-new builder-grade development house with no character whatsoever, so we decided to liven it up a bit.  The wood circles are the little stumps cut off the bottom of Christmas trees, which multiple tree lots let us come and pick up for free.  We painted the wall behind them and then affixed them with mounting tape.

In our current house, our fireplace is all brick from floor to ceiling, so we can’t really do the stumps again.  I loved it while it lasted, though!  We are planning to do a smaller version of this in our faux fireplace in the dining room.

Christmas, here we come!