You see this pile of cabinets? We’ve been hoarding them since January of last year (well, most of them anyway), paying to store them off-site until we’re ready to remodel our gross-but-mostly-usable  kitchen. We had grand plans for these babies, to strip the disgusting paint, rust, and goo off of them and repaint them a glorious, gleaming bright white. We even bought a vintage 50s Chambers stove to match the theme, one without a pilot light and with an oven compartment so tiny that I would have had to buy all new tiny baking sheets to fit inside, and which we recently sold to a very stylish barber from Riverside because we just couldn’t reconcile ourselves to the idea of eventually using it on a daily basis. That was a sad day, giving up that gorgeous hunk of porcelain and chrome, but it had to go.

It’s time for this pile of cabinets to go, too. With so many pressing items on our list of shit to do with this house, the kitchen is pretty far from even being considered ready to renovate, and the monthly expense of housing these supplies has really stacked up. We finally came to the conclusion last night that, once we’re ready to gut and remodel, we’ll either find another set of metal cabinets (in better condition, hopefully), or else we’ll buy new from somewhere (this is starting to become my preference, due to the customizability).

With this decision in place, I’m allowed to start fantasizing in earnest about IKEA kitchens, which is my current favorite in the running for new kitchens.

My friend Alice's new kitchen makes me swoon

via flickr

mmm, shiny red! via flickr

via flickr, love the whitewhitewhite

Anna from Door Sixteen's ikea kitchen, which I love

In the meantime, I need to go through the room and decide what I can do to it to make it less depressing. Sigh.

As I said before, we grew a bunch of veggie plants up from heirloom seeds we got from Baker Creek Seeds. While most of the flower seeds we got from them didn’t do much, the veggies are flourishing. I was really scared that all of the tomatoes weren’t going to survive the chilly weather we had right after we transplanted them into the ground. They stalled for what seems like forever! My boss told me that they’d pick up after it got really hot and sunny for a few days, and she was totally right.

Here's one of our tomato plants.

The squash is getting huge!

Peas!

My borage has exploded! I need to figure out what to do with it.

We ended up supplementing our heirloom plants with a few from the local hardware store, since our hot peppers didn’t seem to be faring too well and I wanted some more herb varieties.

Onions

This thyme smells delicious.

Dill

We’ve also got some volunteer oregano from last year that’s come back with a vengeance, some mint that doesn’t taste/smell very minty (weird), and a few other goodies. In case you’re craving some full-yard shots, here you go (ignore the weeds!):

I’ve got this dream, you see. I want to buy up a few acres of land in Colorado, where when you get far enough from Denver it’s VERY CHEAP (we’re talking around $1,000/acre), and stick a camper or non-trashy trailer on it, and have it be my home-away-from-home, my vacation haven, where I can escape to and avoid modern society and get dizzy from high altitudes and be peaceful. Is that too much to ask?

Here's the coldframe that Kevin built to act as a greenhouse for the seedlings to get them ready to plant.

And here are the seedlings themselves! I'm a proud seed mama.

They're getting so big! Almost ready to go in the ground!

We’re going to have a pretty giant garden this year, including a very large plot dedicated almost entirely to herbs. My oregano and mint from my little herb plot last year actually (surprisingly) came back this year, which is a little magical to me. Nature amazes me.

What are you planting this year?

Here you can see the dual vegetable garden areas on either side of the sidewalk leading down to the garage/alley. We have effectively more than doubled our plot from last year.

Here's Kevin laying down the landscaping fabric between one of the veggie garden plots and the area where I'll have my herb garden (it will be epic). Landscaping fabric is awesome, and Menards just happened to have it on sale this weekend.

One of the trails laid with landscaping fabric, and lined with Purington Pavers, historic bricks and the same kind that several streets in Iowa City are paved with.

The first batch of gravel has been spread. It'll take one or two more loads to get the coverage we want, although I don't think we can finish the gravel paths until the fountain pond thing is completed.

This is not a firepit! It's a planter that looks like a firepit, and which will be dismantled and replaced with (hopefully) one of those whiskey half-cask planters, if I can find one that isn't $40.

Next post: Revenge of the Seedlings!

We weren’t going to be so naive this year, so we ended up ordering heirloom seeds from Baker Creek Seed Company, a business specializing in heirloom seeds out of Missouri. We definitely wanted to go heirloom, since we’re not into Frankenfoods and we like doing things the old-fashioned way.

We ended up ordering a metric ton of seeds (after teasing our friend JoAnn about the amount she wanted, we ordered at least 25% MORE than she did), and last weekend we embarked on the process of sprouting the little bastards. We had no idea what we were doing, but we went to Menards and bought a bunch of setups for growing seedlings, including peat pellets and little biodegradable pots, and we got to work winging it. It’s less than a full week later, and as you can see, we’ve already got growth!

Too bad Mother Nature is taunting our progress.

Sad face.

The current carpeting has been in place in the house since somewhere around 1988, and in the intervening 22 years, it’s been exposed to who-knows-what, including dangerously toxic mold/mildew levels, pet dander, dead skin cells, and whatever has been spilled on it over the years. The result is that I’ve had to start taking my allergy medicine year-round, and most of the time while he is home, Kevin can’t breathe without a very heavy, wheezing crackle. It’s scary, and it needs to be resolved. And if it’s something other than the cruddy carpeting? Well, we’ll move on to the next possible solution with glorious new flooring.

Here is where the herringbone comes in: I’m obsessed with hardwood floors in this pattern. Lookie here, and you will be, too:

The problem, then, is figuring out what to tackle first after the walls are completed. Here are a few prospects:

• Tearing up every square millimeter of carpeting in the house and installing hardwood flooring ourselves
• Tearing out and rebuilding the basement bathroom
• Tearing out and replacing the stairs leading down to the basement, and walling-off the stairs and putting a door at the bottom of them so that it’s a separate space that isn’t open to the upstairs
• New couch
• The Kitchen of Doom

I’m going to follow this up with a series of posts filled with ideas that I have for these projects.
Where would you start?