Kitchen decision-making

I've fallen behind on my blogging, partly because slowing down seems to be in the air here, and mostly because we've been spending so much time planning, worrying about, and fighting over the when and what of our new cucina.

The apartment originally had a smallish kitchen behind a formal dining room that opens off the front hall, opposite the living room. At some point the owners made the dining room into an eat-in kitchen and used the former kitchen for...we're not sure what. Storage, maybe?

Italians take their kitchens with them when they move, including the appliances and cabinets, and when we bought this place there was no kitchen left in either location. Faced with the challenge of an almost blank slate, we've been debating whether to keep the kitchen in the front room (the "new kitchen") or move it back to where the kitchen was originally. Just in the last four days we've gone back and forth on this question at least twice. This has led to some marital stress.

We gave ourselves a deadline of today by making a plan to go to Ikea (known in these parts as "ee-KAY-a"). Ikea has a big store outside of Parma, not far from us, and you can get to it from here by public transportation, a train and then a bus. Ikea is where we're getting the kitchen, and to figure out the pieces we had to know where the kitchen was going to go.

So last night it was decided: we're putting the kitchen in the back room, the "old kitchen." What clinched it was that Danny really wants to have the dining room table by the window, which is where the sink, stove, and so on would be if we went with the "new kitchen" option.

In real-life version walls won't be transparent

I like putting the kitchen in back because it will mean we can sit around the dinner table after eating without looking at the dirty dishes in the sink.

During our visit today we spent more than an hour with one of Ikea's kitchen planners, who thankfully spoke quite a bit of English. To the right is what we came up with, as rendered by Ikea's nifty kitchen-planner program.

To the left is what the room actually looks like at the moment. We have to check a few of those measurements...

And here to the right is the "new kitchen," which is going to revert to being a dining room, but which we've made into our temporary camping kitchen while we wait for everything to get organized. (At the moment it's where all the high-powered electrical outlets are.) I captured Danny making pork cutlets for our dinner tonight on our Ikea induction hot plate. The dining room table will eventually go sort of where he's standing.

What will go on the other side of the room is still under debate.

We're going back to Ikea again tomorrow to finalize the kitchen plan and pay for all of it, including delivery, set-up, and installation.

But while we were there today we picked up a bunch of other things. At the top of our list were a few light fixtures. We've not only been living without heat until recently, but also without any lights in most of the rooms. We're still making do with a flashlight and a few plug-ins. The light in our temporary kitchen is actually part of a mood-lighting sort of lamp that will go in the living room as soon as we get the light fixtures up. To do that we're inviting in an electrician, whom we're happy to pay to climb up a ladder to install them on our ten-foot ceilings.

So we bought light fixtures. Also food-storage jars, extension cords, a bathmat, a couple of sconces, and some other odds and ends. Then we hauled it all home.

At the bus stop. Ikea here seems to do all its business on weekends--during the week it's pretty empty.

You can't see it in his bag, but Ikea sells real cacti as well as ceramic ones and Danny bought a second specimen. He's put it on the living-room windowsill, next to its older brother (on the left--you can see it has started blooming) and a basil plant that Danny bought at the supermarket a few days ago.

Everyone keeps saying how exciting it must be to buy a new kitchen, to say nothing of all this other stuff. I did feel a real rush when we finally had a worked-out plan. There's so much anxiety, though, so many decisions, so much negotiating. It's a little too exciting for my taste. I think I'd really rather blog.