Shafferland 3.0 - The Kitchen

Hello, and a happy SEPTEMBER to you!! What in the world!? It's felt a little fallish in the mornings and evenings around here the last few days, so if it's going to do that, I'm happy to have the calendar match the feels. :)

I'm pretty excited to share today's post with you, because I've been dying to show you our new kitchen!! It is actually one of our very favorite parts of our apartment.

Our kitchen is vastly different from the one in our Kokomo house (in all of its various stages during our time there). But we love it for all its uniqueness! You won't really be able to fully tell in the pictures today, but our kitchen, living room, and dining room are all one great big living space, and that is what we love most of all about it. It's the perfect, perfect fit for us.

I took the photo below from our couch, so you can see how beautifully open it is to the kitchen, and over to the right there, you can see our dining area. (I'll show you that room on a different day.) I still have a little bit of work to do on the decor above the cabinets. I have a cloche jar up there that I want to put some candles in, and I have a covered glass cake plate that needs something inside it. And I have one opening that I think will hold a faux plant - as soon as I find one I like (in my price range).

We have never had white cabinets in a kitchen before, but we love them. They are so bright and cheerful! and they are quality. We really do have a TON of storage in this kitchen. Possibly more than we had in our last one. The cabinets and drawers are also soft-close, which is a perk we've never had before, and we are sort of in love with it. The wall color was here when we moved in, and we love it. Most of our stuff coordinated perfectly with it, even though we've never had this wall color before.

This little bar counter is Ryan's top pick for favorite thing in the apartment. He uses it for a desk, and we eat pretty much every single meal here. (We pull the stools around so we can see the TV while we eat. And yes, that is Andy Griffith running strong on the TV.) I personally love it that there's a plug-in right under that counter top, so we can run computers or our diffuser or slow cooker or anything else we need right from that little peninsula!

Though we have a separate area for the bulk of our coffee stuff, we do keep our main coffee pot, one of our mug trees, and a little coffee spot right there in the corner, and it's one of my favorite things about the place. Fun fact: this little coffee vignette was the first thing I did when we moved in. I needed ONE decoration, and this was it! A little white pitcher I found at a garage sale this summer, filled with all my wooden utensils. The cake plate was my mom's, and the little pitcher with the coffee filters was a Hobby Lobby find. We have our coffee bean canister here, and hey Shari! See my little espresso mug? Think of you every time I see it! :)

Over on the other side of the counter - by the sink - is my utensil holder I bought early in the year, when we still lived in Kokomo. I love it because it isn't round. It sits up flat against the wall. That little coffee sign was a going away gift from my friend and church co-worker, Jenny. She and her husband just adopted a sweet baby boy, so I think of and pray for them every time I see this sign!

I have to tell you about this picture!! One of our friends from small group is a hobby photographer, and he recently started a website to sell some of his prints. This is a picture he took at a park in Kokomo (obviously in the fall), and I loved it for several reasons. 1. Fall. 2. Sunset. 3. The park is one that we used to walk with our friends David and Sheila and our beloved Miss Phoebe. 4. The tree is one that we had our picture taken under a couple of fall photo sessions ago. 5. Our friend took the picture. So I ordered a print of it, and since we don't have a window at the sink, I made my own window!! I love it. And I love praying for Colby and Sarah every time I see the picture!

Here it is up close:

And here is one of the pictures taken under that tree!

Now...back to the kitchen...

I love this engagement picture. It's one of my favorite ones, and since we were drinking coffee, it seemed appropriate for the kitchen...

Here's more of my cooking space!

I no longer have a double oven, which I was initially sad about, but there is an oven out in the community room, so in all fairness, I kind of do still have a double oven if I need it! And I love the smooth cooktop on this one - it's basically the same stove/oven I used to have - just a single version. Same with the microwave. It's almost the same as what we had.

And here's the fridge!! It's also very similar to what we had before. Our old one had French doors with a veggie drawer underneath that opened from the outside. The veggie drawer on this one opens from the inside. Otherwise, it's largely the same. Ryan likes knocking on the window to see the light come on inside. Ha!

There's a little nook on the other side of the fridge that holds a few more treasures:

And on this little angled wall that goes from our coffee nook into the kitchen, we put up a few of our coffee art pieces. (We weren't able to hang up all the wall hangings we had in our old house, because we didn't want to punch TOO many holes in the wall. But we kept the rest of the pieces so if we ever want to switch things up, we can!)

So that's our kitchen! It's a cozy space that we love dearly. We have cooked in there together, and there's plenty of room to move around. We love the open space, we love the storage, and we love how easily it became our coffee kitchen - the new version!