Around My Island

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It's kitchen time today at Project Show Me. You guys already see a picture of my kitchen each time you visit (in my header for those of you reading this on a reader - go ahead, click through, it's a nice picture) so I decided that for today's project shoot I'd zoom both in and out.

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First, the overview. This one is fairly similar to the header photo (which is quite fuzzy now that I look at it), but taken this morning on my DSLR (a Nikon D40 if you're curious) instead of last year on my old point and shoot.

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In it you see where this and this happen(ed), complete with living proof of the former, as well as a great closeup of this (I love this one).

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And from another angle

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Here's a closeup of the cruets, of spilled olive oil fame - I managed to replace the broken one and now we have a matched set again!

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And a peak at part of my cookbook collection (yes, this is only part of it. What can I say, I love cookbooks.)

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And just so I can remind myself how far I've come (both in terms of my kitchen and my photography), here are a couple of pictures of what it used to look like. It was even worse when we first bought the flat - there were two steering wheel shaped (I kid you not) fluorescent light fixtures on the ceiling which through off a huge amount of blindingly white light which reflected oh so beautifully off those pearly white cabinets (a huge honking wall of them) to make you feel like you were sitting inside a flashbulb! (You guys are old enough to remember flashbulbs, right?) Seriously, it was blinding, and the overall look was not helped at all by the horrible black plastic knobs that we lived with for years before a realtor friend walked in one day and said "you know, it wouldn't be quite as awful with chrome fixtures." She was right too, we were kicking ourselves for not doing it ten years earlier. Still, it was a very happy day the day the contractors took a sledgehammer to the thing and paved the way for what you saw above.
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Those black and white tiles even manage to make my red Kitchen Aid look ugly. Then there was the microwave cabinet that was too small for our own fairly small microwave, the stove that had to swim in the too-wide refrigerator spot because our fridge wouldn't fit in the stupidly small hole, leaving the fridge standing alone on the opposite side of the room, the missing bit of counter at the far end where the previous owner had installed her washing machine, which had to be filled in with something that didn't quite match... It was hideous. Big I'll grant you, but my god was it ugly. Here, see for yourselves:

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Now quick, go back up to the top of the page before your eyes start to bleed!

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