Tour My House Tuesday: Kitchen/Dining Room

**I would love to be able to show you larger photos...not sure why some of these are able to be enlarged and some are not.  If anyone has any advice for me on how to do this, I will take it!  So sorry it is not working right now!

Continuing our tour of my house...today it is the kitchen and dining room!  Last week I showed you my family room, which is adjacent to this space.  I really like that the family room and kitchen are in the back of the house; it makes me feel more protected somehow.  (P.S. Can you spot my floppy dog Frankie in the photo below?  He didn't feel like moving.)

When we went to select the kitchen cabinets, I told the guy that I wanted white with black knobs, and he told me that I was one of only three houses in the whole neighborhood (out of hundreds of homes) that had chosen white over natural wood.  He totally made me second-guess my choice!  I am so glad I stuck with it, though, because I love how the cabinets look with the dark wood floors and the black granite countertops.  It has the danger of being a very cold, stark space, but I hope I prevented that by using a warm beige-y yellow on the walls.

Above is a sweet little corner of my kitchen: it is usually covered with my calendar and any number of coupons, notes, post-its...you get the idea.  But it still feels cozy because of my little lamp and cute chalkboard!

When we chose the cabinets, we also got to decide how they were configured.  I begged them to re-orient the kitchen island so that I could have bookshelves facing away from the hubbub of the rest of the kitchen (they are facing my laundry room/pantry).  They aren't the most stylized bookshelves in the world, but they are so stinkin' convenient!

The hanging bookcase above was made by a family friend for me when I got married.  It weighs a ton and my husband practically called the Colorado Builder's Association before he let this thing hang on the wall by itself.  But it looks like it was made for the space, so I hope he feels it was worth the stress of hanging it!  Hmmm....I hope he doesn't answer that.

Yes, this is silly, but I hated the builder's poor excuse for a faucet when we moved in.  I found this charming faucet on ebay and begged until my husband installed it.  I am not sorry...it's like a little jewelry for my kitchen!

Lastly, just a little view of my dining room table with cute little vases full of...what are these?  Berries?  Some kind of bittersweet?  Do I even know what bittersweet is?  (Nope.)  

Hope you enjoyed the tour!  As you read this, my kitchen is probably covered in Cheerios and half empty coffee mugs!  I'm sure you can't relate, can you?