Kitchen Appliances - My Toys - Chapter 1

This is the first installment of the appliances I chose.  The ones after these probably won't be as detailed because they are new to me.  This one I am very intimate with.

Professional interior designers will tell you that a certain % of the building cost is put into the kitchen.  Who knows what ours is.  I will say that %-wise the majority is probably in this kitchen.  C & I really went back and forth about how much we were going to sink into the kitchen but at the end of the day, we decided to go ahead with what we really wanted; knowing that it was more than we should. 

But we literally live in this room, and all of these appliances and cabinets are really going to get used.  So, here is the beginning of my favorite room and I want to say right here and now that I am so thankful and blessed that I have a husband who is willing to make my dream kitchen come true.

They installed the vent hood and the rangetop will be dropped in tomorrow.  I went with the Thermador vent hood.  We had a Vent-A-Hood in our last house and it was really fine but I think that these baffles will be much easier for me to clean.   Although the range top is 36", I went with the 48" vent hood because I am a firm believer that the larger the "capture" area the better the ventilation; and that is only from experience, not book knowledge or tens of thousands of dollars worth of education.

This is my baby.  This is the same rangetop I had in our last house; well, not the same one but you know what I mean.  I'm in love with it.  I am so in love with it that I wanted to get the 48" 8 burner, but I couldn't get 8 burners; the 48" only came with 6 burners and a grill or griddle to take up the two extra burners and I didn't want that.

I know this is going to sound like an advertisement for Thermador but they are simply my heart-felt opinion and feelings.  However, if Thermador would love to reimburse me for saying such nice things about their product that would be great too. 

The two burners on the left have an extra low and an extra-extra low flame.  The extra low flame is on for 50 seconds and goes off for 10, comes on for 50 and so on.  The extra-extra low flame is on for 10 seconds and off for 50, comes on for 10 and so on.  They are great for sauces, melting chocolate, etc.

These are the wonderful sealed 5-point star burners.  With these are reduced cold spots and more flame distribution.  Water will boil 50% faster with these little puppies too.

Now, this is something new since the last one I had.  The burners sit up higher which is going to be sweet come time to clean.

Here she is all installed and ready to go...

Hello Lover.

Scraping and Staining

 Back in December the hardwood floors were laid (layed?  lain?) put down.  Hardwood was installed in the great room, kitchen and pantry.

One of the last things to get done before closing on the house was staining the wood floors.

Before going forward, we needed to select our stain.  These were what we chose from.  We decided the one on the right made the grain in the wood "pop" a little more.

First they sanded and hand scraped,

then they swept up all of the saw dust with this heavy-duty vacuum (my husband would love to have something this powerful but it looks a little cumbersome to me),

then I went home and when I came back a couple of days later the floors looked like this

These photos are really grainy aren't they?  That's because I was using up the 800 speed film that was in my camera.  They also show all of the dusty footprints of the workers