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House tours and stuff

The Days in May and Happy House Anniversary!

On 2023-06-21

I cannot believe how quickly the last six weeks flew by. Our little ranch was buzzing with activities during the whole month of May. Slav’s mom visited us for a couple weeks, then Slav took a business trip to Netherland. He unfortunately got sick during the trip, and a few days after he was back home, my symptoms started. We both had to work intensely during the sick days, which really slowed down the recovery. By the time we were fully (90%) back on our feet, it was already mid-June.

Sickness and deadlines aside, this May has been amazingly beautiful. Colorado got record-breaking amount of rain, and the garden really flourished. We took the opportunity and overseeded lawn grass. The result was so satisfying.

Remember the magnolia tree I planted last Fall, right before the first snow storm? it bloomed the most beautiful flower ever:

The unusual cool and wet spring delayed the blooming time of many early spring flowers. We had hellebore flowers side by side with irises, which never happened before.

My birthday was at the end of May. My mother-in-law gifted me a beautiful lily to add to my collection. And it bloomed immediately after I planted it into the lily garden.

We also welcomed several new friends to the garden. A weeping Alaska cedar, two weeping redbud trees, and a wisteria which I had been wanting for a long time. All of them were planted around the hot tub to add privacy.

And there are peonies. Oh the peonies. This is only the third Spring since the bareroot plants were in the ground. They stayed small during the first two years and did not produce any flowers. But they must be establishing good roots because this Spring, every single plant proudly presented several buds to me. I cut off most of the buds to conserve energy for these young plants. But I let a couple bud from each plant to bloom just to see what I’ve gotten. These flowers were so beautiful and fragrant. Some of them are as big as my palm! I think I am a little addicted.

By mid-June the herb garden has fully come back. I got some comfrey cuttings online and only one out of three cuttings survived. But in just one season, this surviving comfrey has established herself and produced many flowers. Comfrey is a nitrogen fixer and it is easy to soak its leaves in plain water to make comfrey tea as fertilizer. I have been making the comfrey tea every week and give it to my tomatoes.

Speaking of tomatoes, the veggie garden has been an absolute joy this spring. Before leaving town for his business trip, Slav helped me to top all the veggie beds with a layer of fresh compost, and fenced off the whole veggie garden with cattle panels.

With the garden prepared and protected (from Charlie actually, who ate lots of garden produce last summer), I planted my seedlings. I have raised about 100 seedlings mostly tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, pumpkings, and flowers. And everything went into the ground during the last week of May.

Very soon we started harvesting from the veggie garden, which included garlic scapes from the garlic heads I planted last Fall, and lettuces and radishes I directly sowed into the veggie garden in early May. With the recent rain, we are able to harvest fresh lettuce every day for salads. What a treat!

Garlic scape might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it was one of my favorite vegetables growing up. Just like strawberries, they were only available during the last a two weeks of May, which was around my birthday. So growing up, stir-fry garlic scapes and strawberry were my birthday treats. This Spring has been so cool that my garlic scapes grew in slowly. I was able to enjoy them for almost four weeks long and at their freshest.

June is now a month that holds special place in my heart. We bought and moved into our little ranch in June of 2017. Although the house was outdated and badly needed a facelift, it was our first pad and a peaceful nest for us and the dogs. Since then, we have been slowly renovating the house, room by room, in the way that hopefully represents us. The once carpeted, dark, and moldy house is now bright, open, and clean. I am so proud of what we have created, which is not only a house, but also a home. Watching Roxie, Charlie, and the previous Charlie being relaxed and comfortable in our home makes me so proud.

Suddenly we are in late June. Yesterday, we had our first 80 degree day. The summer is upon us and I cannot wait to see the veggie garden flourish. We need some heat for that!

I am sure that we will be harvesting garlic (usually in July), tomatoes (August), and melons (September), then the leaves will start turning colors before we know it. Colorado summer is so short, and we need to make the best of it! I hope you are enjoy your summer too!

The Ranch House Kitchen Reveal

By Alison

On 2022-08-01

In Our House, Renovation

Dear friends, welcome to our new kitchen!

The before and after

After years of planning, months of hard work, and many, many microwavable meals, our kitchen renovation finally came to an end!

We are very satisfied with the new kitchen. I’d say that it functions very well with our small family and life style.

We made a decision to save the kitchen renovation for the last after renovating the rest of the house. And years of waiting was worth it. Knowing very well how we wanted the kitchen to look like and to function made designing the kitchen a smooth process.

Before we get into the details of the finished kitchen, here is a reminder of the old one:

The cabinet wall

The sink/window wall

The living room wall:

And here is the new kitchen today:

The open design and the center island:

The biggest design decision we made in this kitchen renovation is to open it up to the living room. We removed the dividing wall between the two rooms, and made the floor a seamless transition. Here is the view of the open kitchen from the living room:

Personally, I prefer closed kitchen design for its practicality. But when it comes to our 850 sqft main floor space, opening up the kitchen is the best decision for this house. It is the only way we could accommodate a center island for the kitchen, which completely changed the way we use the space.

One reason we wanted an island is to have some eat-in space in the kitchen. This house does not have a formal dining room, so we have been struggling to find a good layout in the living room to accommodate a dining table. With the overhangs on two sides of the island, we have plenty of space for eating daily meals.

We can even get away with a couple close friends’ visit with the island seating. For larger parties and holiday dinners, we purchased a drop-leaf dining table, which can be folded into a console table when not in use. This combination really benefited the furniture placement in the adjacent living room. We now have room here for a big sofa Slav always wanted, and a decent size coffee table.

The center island also offers lots of storage. We chose to have three back-to-back cabinets as the base of the island, and used two as pantry storage. We removed the old pantry closet shown below to make room for the refrigerator, so baking supplies and my instant noodle collections now live in the island.

Relocating the refrigerator:

Speaking of the old pantry closet, it used to face the front door and was the first thing you see when walking into our house.

Here is the same angle now. We relocated the refrigerator here to face the kitchen. An end panel that matches the cabinets was installed here to hide the side of the fridge. A custom Chinese calligraphy proportional to the panel makes the design more intentional:

Losing the hall closet space is not a light decision to make for this small ranch house. But relocating the fridge is far more important. Our old fridge stood between the two windows and protruded out into the room. Being able to incorporate it into the cabinet wall really helped to achieve a clean look for the kitchen.

The old fridge location:

The new one:

We can now have a microwave nearby, making heating up leftovers really easy.

The new fridge features a French door opening and deep freezer drawers. It also has a filtered water dispenser, which is hard to find for a 30″ wide model.

Relocating the fridge also opened the possibility for us to relocate the stove. The old stove was centered on the now cabinet wall. With the sink and old fridge, the already-small counter space was broken into three small pieces. After moving away the stove, we were able to place a 90-inch continuous countertop and upper cabinets on this wall.

This countertop is big enough for prepping meals on a daily basis. It also houses all the small appliances we use often. Thinking ahead of time we installed outlets behind where the small appliances would be, so I can hide all the wires from the plain view.

The cabinet wall

I have talked about the cabinet design and installation before, now we have filled all the cabinets and drawers, I cannot believe how perfectly they all worked out.

The cabinets surrounding the dishwasher store crockery and cutlery.

And the middle upper cabinet is used for storing glassware and tea.

Under the countertop we installed a trash pull out.

And the corner cabinet has a lazy Susan for pot storage.

Above the corner is the only art we have for the kitchen. This is a tile featuring a castle in Slav’s hometown in Poland.

I drew the color inspiration of the current kitchen from this frame, can you tell?

The stove/window wall

Around the corner there is the window wall. Without the bulky fridge we were able to keep the top portion of the room open.

We decided not to install any upper cabinets or shelves here. A range hood in the most minimal design was chosen to keep this wall as airy and open as possible.

The gas stove and the range hood were centered between the windows. The whole wall was tiled to the ceiling as a backdrop.

We are fortunate to have enough room for a pair of spice cabinets surrounding the stove.

Having spice cabinets next to the stove was highly recommended by our friends who have them and now we understand why! Four pullout shelves and the two top drawers house all the spice we need for cooking Western, Asian, and Polish cuisines. Now we no longer need to walk across the kitchen a hundred times a day to retrieve spices from the pantry closet.

Under one of the windows is the new sink! We opted for a single bay sink so we can accommodate the corner cabinet. The new sink is much smaller than the old one, but much deeper. I like that you cannot see dirty dishes in the sink from the living room now.

I like the simple look of the disk faucet. The pull-out sprayer is long though to reach the left burners of the stove, so this sink faucet can almost double as a pot-filler.

The new countertop

One of the best choice we made in the kitchen is our countertop. The quartz countertop is super durable, and we love its look.

The simple edging profile and the rounded corners are also very cute. And the manufacture company even made matching window stools for us using trimmings from our slab.

The biggest piece of countertop is on the center island, which quickly became the workhorse in the kitchen. It adds so much prep space, works as a wonderful baking surface, and doubles as our dining table.

Under one side of the overhang there is Roxie’s food and water:

And the cabinet facing the stove stores cooking utensils and pans:

We have lived in this kitchen for over a month and honestly, I would not change a thing in this kitchen. Everything we have chosen for the new kitchen worked as well as we hoped. We spend most of our evenings here cooking, chatting, and nibbling around the island, while looking over to the big living space which will soon be furnished. I think Roxie’s smile speaks for us all!

Summer Blooms + Nine Year Anniversary

By Alison

On 2022-07-28

In Our House, Renovation

Time flies by fast. Suddenly we are at the end of July. Slav and I celebrated our nine-year wedding anniversary this week. And we have the bouquet from our summer garden for the special occasion.

The 2022 summer garden

Happy summer!