Heart of the Home

Thanks to Mrs. G. for another community blogging day.

Today's topic: Heart of the Home.

The heart of every home is the kitchen. Even though I am not the cook in the family, I fully recognize it is the room filled with sense memories that flow into the mind when a favorite meal is being cooked, when popcorn is popping, when people are drawn to it during a gathering, when I'm sharing counter space with hubby as his sous chef, or with my Mom trying to learn the domestic lessons I never learned as a teenager.

I also picked this room because it is the room I most agonized about (so far) in getting the decor just right, and finding the balance between comfort, function, and appearance. Our kitchen is two conjoined rooms - brought on by an extension that dates from the 1950s. The appliance area has all that a normal kitchen might have - and the adjacent area functions as both pass through to dining room, smaller eating area, and main entrance to the home.

No one but the pizza delivery guy ever uses our front door.

When rooms have such a challenging footprint and such multiple functions, they bring on a lot of discussion from friends and family as to what is best to do with it. This is what it looked like when we bought the house:








Notice the peach walls and teal painted wood floor. Notice the sponge painted peachy yellow walls. Have I mentiond that we bought our home from friends? And luckily....the friendship remains intact! And while we have many many many many things in common....our views on color and decor are very different. (Dellie - I love you, but wow...)

I can't believe I don't have a shot of the wall to the left of this view that was covered from head to toe in a mural of wisteria trees. And then coated with some kind of glaze that required FOUR coats of primer to cover! Here is the picture of the final primer coat - VICTORY!

Notice also the odd pipe and the odd wall pieces jutting into the room on the right side...this was the water waste pipe from our shower. I was at a loss what to do with them...so we painted them the wall color hoping they would fade back into the background (the sound of running water in the pipe, however, was always an odd thing to hear in the kitchen as I munched on a bowl of cereal).

I decided that I needed to turn the color wheel from the peachy yellow, to the complete other side - and went with shades of purple....I agonized over shades and options...

...and finally made a decision....which met with limited success. I hated the lavender color. I had hoped for a natural lavender tone, which is actually more grey than purple. But I got Easter Egg.

The deep eggplant in the separate kitchen/appliance area, though - THAT I loved.

But then, a year or so later, we had an epiphany...and I sought and found the "natural" tone I was looking for. I found it in an unnatural source - laminated flooring that is made to look like a multi-colored slate. We matched the tone of that to a beautiful color called Nantucket Grey (a soft greyish green), added a custom built in book-case - because books are REALLY the heart of our home, and a custom made table from our friend and artist Rob Wilson, and I couldn't be happier with the results.


Notice how this also solved the pipe and wall shape issue? Our friend Justin Sprock did a fabulous job building the unit and walling in the pipe. Now, no strange water noises and a seamless wall unit.

This, then, is the part of my home I "heart" the most.

Welcome to my place.