Before and After: a tale of a home renovation, part 3

Welcome to our kitchen. It is at the back of the parlor level of our brownstone, just off of the living room, which you saw in part 2. This is my favorite room of the house and probably where I spend the most time. The huge kitchen table serves as the headquarters for our family, where we have family meals, do art/craft projects, sit and chat with friends, play games, you name it. The back of the house has a southern exposure so we get light flooding into this room in the afternoons which works well for my obsession with plants.

When we bought the house there was actually no kitchen on this floor of the house, instead it was being used as bedrooms. We loved the high ceilings and formal detailing on this level so we decided to move the kitchen to this floor. There was considerable damage to the ceiling from a leak in the upstairs bathroom, so that became a huge repair project for Frank, in fact he still works from time to time doing plaster work on the moldings that were damaged.
Here is a corner of the room before...

...and after.

You can see that we took out a couple of closets, and a decorative arch, and put in our kitchen where they used to be. Wow, that blue paint sure was bright! Here is a picture of the same wall further towards the windows, before...

...and after.

I was in charge of picking out all of the tiles, sink and sink fixtures as well as the appliances, which was such a fun job. We used blond wood on the floors and cabinets throughout the house, and I chose tiles in shades of blue which complements the blond nicely. Here in the kitchen the back splash tile is ceramic, the cabinets and farmhouse sink are from Ikea, and for the counter tops we chose a dark granite to give the feeling of slate. Here is another before and after of the damage to the ceiling...

When we moved in we knew that we wanted to add a deck onto the back of the house, which we also knew was going to be a huge job because one of the windows in the kitchen would have to be converted to a door if we wanted access to the deck from this floor.
We waited until we had lived in the house a year, and Jasper was about 10 months old, to finally start the deck project. I'll show you pictures of the deck when I show you the "before and afters" of the backyard. Here is the door that we added (sorry no before picture of the window) where the window used to be, we also had to move the radiator that was underneath that window. We placed the radiator between the new door and the other window, and a friend of ours custom built that lovely radiator cover with the vertical slats, which then gave us more counter space.
Frank has recently embarked on a series of interior paintings of our house, I wanted to share this one, bellow, of the kitchen with you. The painting hanging behind our kitchen table is one of mine called Meditation, you can read about Frank's ideas behind his painting of the room (and my painting) here on his blog.

Looking forward to sharing more of our renovation in part 4!