Cookin' in the Kitchen

Canning on the kitchen stove

Our scale

The end product

"Now I'll get to see if the kitchen works for canning."

So said Nancy as she began a long day of canning sour cherries and pickled zucchini. With our garden starting to produce, the annual canning and preserving ritual begins. This work is highly reliant on the stove and the kitchen work space. We managed in the yurt for years with a tiny little gas stove and a 3 1/2' wide counter, so clearly our new kitchen would be adequate, but would it all feel like it works well?

I'm glad to say after a few hours of sterilizing, boiling, warming and more boiling the verdict was yes, it works well. Our stove is obviously a good bit larger then our old one and the front-right burner is specifically a large-ring high-BTU unit intended for powerful output. When we are canning we are continually replenishing and reheating the large canning pot with water and it takes a lot of umph from the stove to keep it at a boil. Often in the past we'd be waiting some portion of the time just for the canning pot to get up to a boil again.

Spurdles

A collection of spurdles and rye

We have a small collection of spurdles that are now hanging in our kitchen. Some of the rye that we planted in the yard has formed its tassels and I was inspired to put them together.

What's a spurdle you ask? Why its a Scottish stirring stick of course! I believe they are typically used for porridge, but we use them for lots of things. Nancy got a bit of a spurdle collecting bug and now we've received a few different ones. The one second from the left was hand turned by our neighbor John Riley.

House Warming

Look closely at Teri's card...

Yesterday a pile of folks showed up to visit, have a little food and look around. It was a great afternoon and the weather cleared up with a little time to do some mowing and arranging outside. It was a wonderful celebration.

Many friends and family were here. In particular it was great to have Joe and Adam back to celebrate what we all helped create. I wish we could finish building our house more often so we could have an excuse to gather together our friends and neighbors like this more frequently.

Our friends Jeanne and Craig thoughtfully offered a blessing of salt, wine, and bread inspired from a scene in "Its a Wonderful Life":

Bread- that this house may never know hunger

Salt - that life may always have flavor

Wine - that joy and prosperity may reign forever

Among the treats and great food, Nancy tried out a recent discovery called switchel, which used to be served a refreshing drink on farms in the days before gatorade-type drinks. Its super yummy and I'm hooked...

Solstice etc..

The house about 10 minutes after noon on the summer solstice

It has been a year since I first noticed how the roof shadow at the summer solstice lines up ever so neatly just after noon to reveal only the sun part of the sunburst on the south face of the house. This little event is a delight for me and today I was out there again taking pictures to document the moment.

Insulator lamps hanging from track over the dining room table

I recently made a couple more of the hanging insulator lamps. You may remember the one I made that hangs over our tub. My idea for the lights over the kitchen table was to have a series of lamps that will all hang at different heights and are made from insulators of different shapes. I'm pretty happy with the effect. The lights are dimmable, so the light can be quite intimate and candle-like.

The new motion detector light switch for the mudroom/pantry closet

This image shows the detection range of the switch (in blue). At some point it might make sense to move it so it is pointing towards the door so it registers movement right away, rather then after you start to move into the room

In other news, I replaced the conventional light switch in our kitchen/mudroom closet with a motion detector switch so we don't have to manually turn on the light every time we go into the closet. My previous plan was to install a push-button switch that would have been activated by the door itself, but that would have required a bunch of wall and trim deconstruction. The motion-activated switch was an easy and quick solution and it works really well. If you open the door and don't step in, nothing happens, but as soon as you move into the room the light comes on.

Done Enough!

So, yes, the house is "done enough" and we'd like to extend an invitation to any of our long-time blog followers. If you plan to come and need directions, email us at decthree (at) rcn (dot) com.

In fact the house isn't really done, but it's at a place where we want to celebrate all the hard work and all the people who've helped along the way. We've long been looking forward to having this get-together!

See you then!

The Island

Our new old island

The hold-all box. We keep oils and such in there

The maple work surface and cherry shelf on the stainless base

It's always been our plan to build a kitchen island to round out the space and utility of the room and give the area a gathering point. Up till now it has felt a little too spacious because there has been that central piece missing. So it was something of a coincidence that my sister called us up and asked if we'd be interested in borrowing their old kitchen island for the indefinite future as they work on selling their current home and make plans to build a new house.

We jumped on the idea because although we fully intend to create an island when the time comes, its not currently at the top of our list since the kitchen is functional enough without it and things like shelves, screen doors, and places to store our clothes are a bit more pressing.

So, I went over earlier this week and picked it up and my 4 year old niece Solveig helped me load all the parts into the car.

It is turning out to be a really great addition to our home and I said to Randy on the phone after we'd got it in place that our motivation to go ahead and build our island just decreased by about seventy-five percent. It matches the wood types we have in our kitchen: a maple countertop/cutting surface, and a cherry shelf that matches the cherry cabinets. It fills out the general area of the kitchen really nicely and answers to what was a significant missing element in our overall plan.

Randy had this island put together after asking a restaurant supply house if they had a metal base that might work as an island and Liza found the cutting board at a yard sale, although it was a little to short to fill the full length of the base, so they had their friend Johnny built them a hold-all box to fill out that remaining space, along with the cherry shelf down below. I would never have thought to put in a box like that, but its great. It keeps the stuff you use all the time right in the middle of things and keeps the work/eating area of the cutting board clear.

The island also gives our groovy industrial stools something to gravitate around. They fit together well with the style of the the island.

Bathroom Vanity

The hinged mirror door closed. Note the "hanging" tilt to the mirror

Note the outlet in the right-hand side of the cabinet. The electrical cords run down and under the removeable wooden shelf and up to the chargers, keeping things neat.

Early on in the project as I was edging out the sheetrock opening

We were away on vacation for a couple of weeks and a project I had started before we left only got finished yesterday, namely the mirror vanity in the second floor bathroom.

We had sheetrocked over this area and planned to come back at some point and build a vanity in the wall cavity with an openable mirror mounted on the opening.

For a couple of months we had this great old mirror hanging there and I enjoyed how the mirror hung slightly off the wall at an angle. When I began this little project I wanted to maintain the look of a hanging mirror, rather then have it lay perfectly flat against the wall. This took some tricky hinge work to make happen, but it came together well and achieved the look I was going for. Nancy and I picked this mirror up off the street in North Adams, Massachusetts at least 10 years ago and have had it hanging around since. With a little paint and clean-up it's got a nice stately feel.

A second aspect of this little project was wiring in a receptacle in the cabinet that we could plug our re-chargeable toothbrushes into, rather then having them messily draped out in the room. I built a little raised shelf so the wires of the chargers run down out of the outlet and under the shelf with just a little wire coming up to the charger. This keeps the cabinet free of the wires as well. I'm pleased with how its all come together.