![]() ![]() She is so talented! A dream kitchen is a lot of pressure and a lot of money and it only makes sense to hire someone that has literally designed THOUSANDS of kitchens (did you know that Jean started as a kitchen designer?), has their own customizable cabinetry line and is now a judge for an international designer’s kitchen competition after winning herself a handful of times. I’ve been a fan of Jean’s since discovering her work back in 2017–we shared her here as an account to follow–and I’m not the least bit surprised that she has grown so much since then. A large single bowl sink! He asked me what my dream kitchen would include and I said, “It would be designed by Jean Stoffer.” And he said, “Let’s try and make that happen!” And we did! I asked Chris (the cook around here) what would make this his dream kitchen and he made a list including multiple countertop surfaces, storage for his variety of knives and spices, a 60″ range, a place to store his cookbooks, a separate place to prepare drinks and plate meals. I think it was kismet that we never had the chance to properly do the kitchen in our last house, our dream kitchen, because it would have been even harder to leave, but here we’re going all out. Which feels luxuriously roomy–we’re hoping to include a casual sitting area by the windows, too! But before that, there are a few things to figure out, including how to work around the staircase that runs through what will be our pantry wall and how to make it all look flush although some areas recess and some don’t. So mentally and financially we were ready! I think part of the reason this decision was easy for us to make was we were planning on doing a kitchen renovation at this exact time in our last house. Those two photos are the same angle and it feels so spacious and so much lighter and brighter and exciting. ![]() To cut to the chase, in 30 minutes time, we decided to demo the entire kitchen, including the wall that separated the formal dining room and kitchen and expand the kitchen toward the front of the house. But I can totally see a large outdoor dining table in our future and several stools along an island. Not that it needs more of an explanation than “different houses and different seasons of life call for different things,” but we also no longer live by the 45 other members of Chris’s immediate family and my entire family is also no longer in the same spot so we feel okay about downsizing the dining space a little. (Above: First photo is the former formal dining room and below is the breakfast nook) ![]() This coming from people who added a 20 person dining room to their last house! At this point, the kitchen was open to a breakfast nook that was nearly the same size as the formal dining room and it was feeling so cut up and not functional. Both would hold the same amount of people and the same table size… just separately. I loved the swinging door and the transom above it, but we realized pretty quickly the kitchen separating two eating areas on either side didn’t make a ton of sense for us. They told us it wasn’t load bearing at all. Not just in the middle, but around the perimeter, too! In our case, it dropped more than a foot around the perimeter! While we were having this conversation, they started asking about the door between the dining room and kitchen–if we wanted it wider or what. I’ve gotten a lot of questions about why I don’t prefer tray ceilings, and I think it’s just because I’d rather the ceiling be tall all around. The floors were already on the list, but we also added removing the tray ceilings in the former dining room and primary bedroom. The day we closed on our home (the first week of May), we met with contractors to discuss what we would have them do before we moved in. ![]()
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