Yes! We got the house! Made an offer on it this morning, did a bit of back-and-forth negotiations there, and it’s a yes! This after 2 days of me and the agent narrowing down about 30 houses (out of a previous 125, from the first listings of 200+) to the final 3. Yesterday bumped #1 off the list (BEAUTIFUL new construction house, with an awesome morning room, but bad school district — though it won’t matter much to us as homeschoolers, we had to nix it, in case we decide to move again) and put back #4 and #5 in. Hubby quickly vetoed #2 (bad location, houses in the area not very well kept, not good for resale), #4 (very much like #3 but not as good a location, too near the highway), and #5 (beautiful neighborhood, big kitchen, bad hilly yard — nice for sledding in the winter but bad for resale and gardening, IOW too expensive and not a good value for the price)and we ended up with #3.

It’s number 3 because of the size of the kitchen — I keep thinking — WHERE am I going to hold cooking lessons in this kitchen??? BUT. Hubby is amenable to a remodel, or at least the addition of my dream appliances — though practical me is now changing my mind about getting this, my dream cooktop — maybe I’ll take Geraldine with me and get Kirk’s BTU monster instead — more power, cheaper, and awesome for partying outdoors (yeah, even in the dead of winter). Which will give me a bit more room in the budget for this or this. Meanwhile, I’ll continue my drooling over here. And working on resurrecting my old oven and range comparison charts that I did 2 years ago.

There’s a nice planning area opposite this, where the pantry and ref are, so that’s probably where the second oven would go. The adjoining room — no division — is the “breakfast nook”, which I’m thinking of appropriating for more workspace. Also thinking of getting rid of the island and putting a peninsula of sorts instead….

I have to vent a bit here. Most house listings include the breakfast nook when listing the room dimensions. That is TOTALLY wrong and not helpful at all to a potential buyer, esp. one who’s a serious cook. Especially if you do your initial homeshopping online — we eliminated a whole bunch of houses based on kitchen size.

But take this kitchen, for instance, which was listed as measuring 20′ x 14′. NOT accurate, since they’re counting the breakfast nook with that, a.k.a., in real estate terms, the “eat-in kitchen”. Strictly speaking it’s NOT part of the kitchen since you’ll be doing the bulk of your work around that area where you’ve got your big 3 — range, ref, sink. Having an 11’x14′ kitchen WITH an adjoining 9’x14′ area does not a 20’x14′ kitchen make!!! What about door openings and windows, which effectively cut the workflow in two? For serious cooks who need a considerable amount of counterspace and storage space, the lack of accuracy in MLS listings equates to a waste of time and sets you up for disappointment more often than is necessary. Though of course we had other criteria (flat yard, nice-sized rooms, a large homeschooling room) that led to our decision, we would have saved a lot of time and effort if kitchen measurements were held to a standard. Sure, it’s not national security, but these things matter to people who spend a lot of their waking hours working with food. Man, I could get political when it comes to food LOL.

Seriously, if I can’t make money writing about food, I think I’d like to make some as a kitchen designer. God knows I’ve been doing a fair bit of it for the past 2 years. Think you’d hire me? I promise to be nice and not go all mental on you:) — but then again… there’s Kitchen Design Academy to think of first.