Once Upon a Kitchen

Once upon a time, Stephen and I lived in an apartment with a kitchen the size of a hallway. There was a fridge, oven, 8 cabinets, and just enough space for a counter-height table for two, and one bar stool. There was no dishwasher, which means that 80% of our newlywed fights were about dishes, and our microwave - the smallest one we could find - took up one-third of our countertop space. Which left us with two countertops.

When we moved, it was to our Home Sweet House. Our two-person counter-height table looked sadly out of place in the expansive kitchen, but we were thrilled at the opportunity to find and buy a more appropriate table. Other than that, there wasn't much that we loved about our new kitchen. 

This is what I started out with: yellow formica countertops and backsplash from probably the 60's. 

That wallpaper took me about a week to remove.

I MEAN. I don't want to complain, but I'm just saying. 

The cabinets were durable, but not too pretty.

Aaaand, this was the floor. A beautiful, flowery laminate. 

It was too overwhelming to re-do everything at once. We started with painting the walls.

You can kind of see it here: the two-toned gray that we did in the rest of our casa.

The next thing I attempted to change was the countertops. I scoured blogs about how to paint your countertops to make them look like granite, and one day did it as a surprise for Stephen.  

He was very nice about it, but he wasn't really sold. He is all about the real Mccoy stuff. 

The next big thing we re-did was the cabinets. We wanted to re-do the floor, and in order to do that, we had to take out all the cabinets, and once we had taken them out, it was clear they were not going back in even if we had wanted them to.

When we took off the weird box thing above the cabinets above the sink, we discovered that that wall had never been finished. Ever. 

The demolition part of the cabinet re-doing was actually kind of fun! We used a crowbar and a sledgehammer, and Stephen's brother helped.  

We moved e'erything in the kitchen (appliances included) into the living room.

So that was a little awkward and we looked like hoarders, and I told my visiting teachers they couldn't come over, but I think we can all understand why.

We toiled over the floor (more details on that here) and when it was finally in, we were ready to insert our new cabinets. 

This was enough to keep us happy for a while. Some friends of ours gave us a dishwasher and microwave, which we pretty much peed our pants over. It is our first dishwasher we've had the whole time we've been married! 

With the cabinets up, we had some more choices to make. We had gotten a plain ol countertop from Ikea, but as I mentioned before, Stephen is all about the real Mccoy stuff. After a lot of back and forth, we finally decided to get granite. 

We ended up ordering our granite from Ogden Flooring. We highly recommend them! Sterling was the main person we talked to, and he was amazing. He was so prompt in getting back to us and really made an effort to get us exactly what we needed and wanted. We also ordered our backsplash from them, and the sink.

But unfortunately, everyone else loves them too, so that meant we had to wait another 3 weeks after ordering before the kitchen was totally finished. 

Which meant that when I made pumcakes, it looked like this.  

.....what a life.

Oh! And you know what else? I didn't have a sink for that time. So dishes had to all be done in the bathroom sink, and one time I made tomato soup from my garden tomatoes, and it looked like we killed someone in the bathroom when I was done. 

SIGHHHH.

Oooh. Here's one of me making tuna noodle casserole. No countertops = you have to improvise.

And then! One day! Stephen texted me this picture, along with the caption: "Looks good so far!"

We were so excited, we put knobs on that very night. 

Also, our date night may have been clearing the clean dishes out of the dishwasher with child-on-Christmas-morning-like enthusiasm, and making comments about how warm and clean they were. It's the little things. 

Notice that we moved the dishwashing soap back to it's home, as well as our knives and wooden spoons. 

At this point, we were just waiting on the backsplash and two more drawers. 

Just a few days after the countertops were in, they came back to do the backsplash. We are a little obsessed. 

Clearly, there is one thing in this picture that sticks out like a sore thumb: the oven / stove / range. (Why does that thing have 3 names.) It's the one that came with the house, and we were planning to replace it next. But for the time being, it worked fine and wasn't too big of a concern.

THEN our friends who got us the dishwasher and microwave called to say they also have a new oven for us! When he was describing it over the phone I couldn't believe my ears. It was exactly the kind that Stephen and I had talked about getting!

So it was out with the old and in with the new!

Much better :)

I know I complained loud enough for my ancestors who cooked over fires in the wilderness to hear me, but throughout the whole process, we were really very blessed. It was not a small task, but now I have a kitchen that I am excited for my family to see when they come out here for Christmas! I have an oven that I can safely set to the right temperature, instead of turning it 50* lower. I have a microwave that I can fit a whole dinner plate in without it clanking against the side when the turntable turns. I have more cabinets than I know how to fill and more counter space than I've had my whole life as a married lady.

And best of all, I don't have yellow formica on any walls, anywhere, in my house.

Before.....

After.

Before......

After.

Before......

After.

Before.....

After,

I probably posted way too many pictures for anyone to have made it all the way to the bottom of this post. I just can't stop looking at the transformation! Just tell me if you want to see it in the person. We'll invite you over for dinner :)

Which Witch?

I may be the only teacher in the whole world who genuinely loves Halloween.

I'm at least in the minority, grouped together with a bunch of other first and second-year teachers who haven't been teaching long enough to hate this day of glorified sugar rushes and approximately zero education, but I really love it! I love the costumes, and I love dancing the Monster Mash, and I love making witch's brew.

Before we started putting the food together, I like to sing "Witch's Brew" by Hap Palmer with my class. They love it and so do I! What do you think the cap is on who would enjoy this song? 4th grade? Maybe 5th? I mean I still like it, but I am kind of a 2nd grader at heart :)

I thought it would be fun to wear a witch hat while making the witch's brew, but since I didn't have one, I just made one out of construction paper when I got to school. And then, since that turned out to be so easy, I cut some paper for my kids to make their own!

The hats are made with one piece of construction paper, cut in half. I put out 4 colors so they could mix and match and choose a half-sheet of orange and a half-sheet of green, or whatever they wanted. 

I gave two stencils to each table. They needed to cut a circular hole in the center of one of the half-sheets of construction paper, and a bit of a slope on the other half-sheet. 

The hardest part was folding the slope-cut half-sheet into a party hat shape, and honestly, I ended up doing almost all of them. I stapled them twice, and it actually didn't take too long.  

How cute are my kids! Ah.

I gave everyone a few minutes to decorate their hats, by coloring them or cutting a special design into the brim.  

They were definitely not the sturdiest of hats, but they were cute, and it was a fun addition to our witches brew activity!

There are a ton of recipes smattered all over the internet, but the one I used this year is one I got from a teacher on my team. It called for

-cinnamon red hots
-Cheerios
-gummy worms
-Chex cereal (plain)
-candy corn
-sunflower seeds
-M&M's
-Skittles
-raisins
-marshmallows
-pretzels
-Fritos
-Bugles

So, kind of a lot of ingredients. What I liked about it, though, is that everything coordinated really cutely to something else! The cinnamon red hots were drops of blood, the Cheerios were cat eyes, the gummy worms were earth worms....etc. Not only that, but I have a few allergies in my class and nothing on this list was a problem for any of my allergy kids.

This year, I asked parents to send everything in on the day we made witch's brew in class. Next year, I think I will ask for everything to be sent in a day or two before we make witch's brew. I want to take it out of the original packaging and put them in bags, bottles, or boxes with labels. I found so many cute ones on this Pinterest board, but it was after I had already done it with my class. Some of them are printables, some cost money, and some are editable. I'm sure there's something on there that will meet your needs!

I was the only one who mixed the witch's brew, and I separated them into individual baggies for my kiddos to snack on during seat-work. 

We do this worksheet along with our activity, which I got for free on TPT from the lovely Shelley Gray. This worksheet is perfect for reviewing sequencing, and the pictures on it are so cute! It doesn't exactly match up to the recipe I used, so I just let my kids put the ingredients in whatever order they wanted.

We ended up having several extra baggies, so we were able to share our witch's brew with some of the other teachers and our cute office ladies. Do you make witch's brew in your classroom? What do you do to make it fun?

Happy Halloween everyone!