But since I have a book to write, I wanted to do something fun and easy to make my office space unique and amusing. I found some amazing wall decals on Etsy, and hung them all up in the space of an hour. It was bonehead easy, and every time I look up at the slanted ceiling above my head, I smile.

I ordered some branches, more branches, and some extra birds.

I ordered this one for my laptop, but forgot it was for my laptop and put it above the lightswitch instead. Oops. It’s still cute, with birds in… Twitter blue!

This is the first one I put up – very easy. The birdhouse is a separate piece. You peel the paper off the decal, stick the clear sticky part with the decal on it to the wall, rub it with a plastic card that’s included (Thanks!) and then peel carefully. It was supremely easy and once I got the hang of it, it went very quickly. The transformation to the wall was so amazing and made me hugely happy.

The big branch was next. This was a separate order from a different artist and I (oops) ordered a left-facing branch instead of a right one, and this one couldn’t be flipped over because of the bird’s nest in the middle.

I should have realized this one was meant to come from the left and flipped the birdhouse one, but I already put that one on the wall by the time I realized it. But no worries. I think I found a solution that works.

Halfway done (Pardon the glare in the picture. It was morning when I took these, and if I had the light on it was 9000 Celsius in my office).

Time to add birds! I have black, blue, and red.

And now, this is the view above my desk. It makes me ridiculous happy. And the total for the decals was less than $100, and 1 hour of work. Yay Etsy!

I’m still deciding which apron to buy (I really love the ones with the matryoshka doll though), I’ll probably get a half apron, since I don’t have one in my collection, but she has such fun “marketing” on her page and such whimsical apron designs, I think they have to be rewarded with a purchase, don’t you?

Ned went to the Science Center with the tot over break and brought home this neat craft project. Essentially you place one image on either side of a straw. When you twirl it between your fingers, the two images look like they are combined in one.

About a year and a half ago, January through August 2008, while we had a newborn and a 2 year old, we renovated our kitchen. Wow, was that ever a good idea. The newborn Baba O’Riley was easy, but poor Freebird had a microwavable menu that was just… sad.

Here’s a picture of the old kitchen. It was about 12′ wide by 12′ wide. And impossible.

I do not know why there was a mirror over the cooktop in the corner. Really. No clue. I didn’t want to look at my own boobs while cooking, I do know that.

One of the countertops was barely 18″ deep – barely enough to hold the breadmaker. Note: the microwave? 8′ in the air. WHAT THE DICKENS were people THINKING?! We will not discuss the number of times I nearly spilled hot soup on my own head. Explain THAT at the ER, shall we?

This was the second time in my life I’d renovated a kitchen. Before we had children, Hubby and I lived in Jersey City, NJ, and we gutted and renovated that kitchen, too. It was a lot easier when it was just the two of us, and we did that kitchen on a seriously tiny budget.

The contractor was all, “Oh, and we’ll do custom tile floors” and we were all, “The hell we will. We’d never get that money back in resale.” I remember clearly when the Formica was put in on the counters, and the smell of the hot clue. Rwor. Sexxy.

So this time, we wanted to do our kitchen on a budget, but we didn’t want to use Formica, either. We saved up for a hellalong time and looked at all sorts of financing options before we decided that we had to (a) completely remove the old kitchen because there wasn’t a configuration that could possibly improve it, because it sucked, and (b) we had to make sure we did it exactly the way we wanted because we’d be living with it for a long, long time. This was, unlike Jersey City, a renovation without half an eye on selling the property soon.

This is the new kitchen:

That corner is where the mirrored cooktop used to be. We added on to the house and that single-door cabinet next to the window marks where the old kitchen and the back wall of the house stood.

I’m standing in the addition taking this picture. The area inside the counter top is the space where the old kitchen was. The cat to the right of the drawers is Gracie. She never misses a photo op. There are drawers beneath the cooktop for pots and pans, and lazy susans in each corner. The backsplash is grey subway tile (very budget-friendly) and the backsplash above the cooktop is blue glass tile (not budget friendly). I wanted to do the entire backsplash in the blue glass but oh, my stars and garters. There was no way. Holy smokin’ expensive. There were other options during the design phase, including this trend where you put a tile mosaic of a rooster or a giant scary peen-like cornucopia above the cooktop, but I didn’t want any farm animals looking at me when I cooked. So we did a small section of the blue glass and the rest in slate grey subway tile.

The cabinet to the left of the wall oven (beneath that, partially hidden, is the microwave, at kid-level) is the pantry. The shelves roll out – this is simply freaking majestic. Prior to that our nonperishable foods were in a drafty, horrible closet by the back door that made everything in there extremely perishable.

The addition is very popular, as we added a lot of windows, and places for the cats to watch Birdie TV.

You’ll notice that the windows are very, very popular (That’s Oliver, Grace’s brother).

The working space of the new kitchen is about the same size of the old kitchen, except that it’s laid out about 1,000,000 times better.

We did a number of things I really liked when we finally did the whole renovation, including an addition to the house itself that added a dining area and a half bath, and the closet in which I store sweet potatoes. The counter tops are Caesarstone, which is a quartz composite, and I spent a LOT of time on researching countertop options on budgetary, environmental, and practical levels, and must have felt up a few hundred different samples.

We were religious followers of The Church of Consumer Reports for most of the appliance purchases, except that I really wanted a five burner gas cooktop with knobs located such that I didn’t light my arm hair on fire to reach the back ones, and CR didn’t rate those specifically. The new kitchen is such an impossible improvement over the old one, I can’t even tell you.

But let’s cut to the good part, right? Here, let me show you the most expensive thing in the kitchen. Ready?

You sure?

Here it is!

This pillar is named “Overbudget.” Sexy pillar isn’t it?

When the contractor removed the appliances from the old kitchen, he found a floor that was so sagging, and so bowed toward the basement, he was afraid to step on it. Seriously. Adolescents could have skateboarded in there for hours. Such are the joys of renovating an 80 year old house – ask me about knob and tube wiring! We had plenty of that, too, but we knew it was in there – ergo that portion was in the budget. The hella-warped floor? No idea.

So, we had to get a set of support pillars. They were Ex. Pen. Sive. For the amount of money those pillars cost, they should be beautiful, right? NO. They’re kind of plain. But I love them. Because right above Overbudget, and his brother Screw That Estimate are the fridge, the oven, and some cabinets, and they’re still on the first floor where they were installed over a year ago. THANK GOD.

So that’s my kitchen. Stay tuned for cooking from inside the kitchen. It’s where I hang out most of the time. The cats, too.