documenting our current home: the kitchen & dining room

when i was little, i loved going to my Grandma Shirley's house and looking through the albums she kept of all the different houses she had and how she decorated them. i always thought it was peculiar that she took so many pictures of the same room all from different angles, but now i wish i had those albums. she passed away almost 10 years ago and i regret not snagging it when we divided up our most cherished possessions of hers. (i also regret not getting her album of Tom Selleck magazine clippings, but that's neither here nor there...) 

i've decided to take a cue from my grandma, who is greatly missed, and take pictures of our current home. after living in this rental for 3 years (the longest place my husband and i have ever lived in, and almost the longest house i've ever lived in my whole life!) i finally feel like it has a style and most of my to-do projects for it have been done. at least in the common areas, upstairs is a different story. but i digress. here are the pictures. i'll start with the kitchen & dining room. 

i do not claim to have any photography experience of any kind, so please forgive the crazy lighting, dark pictures, and blinding white spots! this is my beloved dining table. we purchased it at the Encinitas Street fair, and it is supposedly solid Rosewood imported from Africa. i knew it would be my forever table the moment i laid eyes on it. my desire is for it to be an heirloom, passed down to my kids and theirs. sadly, it will not fit in our new home, but i will be storing it in the garage for a few years until we are able to upgrade. the chairs are from IKEA (similar here). the map is a sheet of framed wrapping paper from Paper Source. (to see my future kitchen's inspiration board, click here.)

it's a little hard to see but that green picture on the wall is a chalkboard. it's where we keep our memory verse for the week. i'm always changing the design based on my current pinterest inspiration. i made the curtains from fabric purchased at a store here in Fresno called Home Fabrics. i just sewed all the way around the edges and clipped them with drapery clips. 

view into the kitchen. i'm not wildly in love with this kitchen by any stretch of the imagination, but it's a good size and has lots of counter space for all the cooking i do. we will still have a large bar area for stools and plenty of counter space in the new house, so i'm pretty excited about that. we'll also have granite counter tops, which makes me happy because i loath grout. 

i purchased the stools from Craigslist, but you can find similar ones here. 

i would love to spray paint them a fun bright color like these ones at The Butcher's Daughter in New York, but i have have a lot of bright "pops" of color all over the house and i fear it will soon look like a circus up in here. what do you think? what color would you paint them? i love them in this yellow!

last but not least, my favorite part of my kitchen, the bay window. i'm a plant murderer, so they all look sad and droopy, but i love having luscious green plants too look at while i'm doing dishes. and no, it doesn't always look like a dark dungeon in my kitchen, it's just this bad photographer's lack of lighting wisdom. 

so there you have it. it's been documented. in it's most clean state. it's nothing special, but it gets the job done and i've managed to add little personal touches here and there. now i can't wait to sell half of it and pack the other half! 

xo, tara