The Third Day of Christmas

...my true love gave to me, three pendant lights...two green gas fireplaces...and a massive hood over the rangeOK. In all fairness, we can both claim the lights and the fireplaces.

In the plans, we had called for four pendant lights over the kitchen island. As we looked at the rough electrical, that fourth light didn't make sense to us, so we dropped the fixture. Laura picked these pendants to match other lighting in the great room (which you should get to see around day nine in this series). As seen here, a couple of adjustments are yet to be made. The length of all three will be made even with the one in the middle, and we're still working out how to get them plumb and square with all the other square elements in the decor.

In the old house, we had two wood burning fireplaces. One in the living room, and another like a barbeque pit in the dining room. Honestly, we never had a fire in either one during the prior 12 years. We both wanted at least one fireplace, and truly wanted one in both the living room and the great room. But the old ones out of brick had a very large footprint and were situated awkwardly for our anticipated use patterns.

Another factor was smog. To preserve air quality, there are winter days here where wood fires are not permitted. That pointed us towards the green element of gas models. Early on, our builder, John Hammerschmidt, alerted us to a two sided model. He'd encountered this in another remodel where it was used as both an indoor and outdoor fireplace. While when compared to a single gas unit these are pricey, they are just about break even when compared to two units. And, it had a single footprint. As a plus, going this direction made fireplace selection easy: there were only two models from which to pick!

This picture of the fireplace is from the living room entry. The mantle should be installed around it almost about the time this is posted.

That leaves the range hood. This one goes to Laura. A big attraction of this remodel for her was getting a bigger kitchen. The old one in this house was honestly a big step up from the one in our first condo. That one in the condo was a galley style, which Laura refers to as a "one butt kitchen." While the old kitchen here allowed for "two butts," the work triangle and sight lines meant that there was very little room for folks to visit with the cook during preparation.

Now, picking the range hood was really a function of the range. John recommended GE Monogram and Profile models from experience. It was our (usual) good fortune that GE appliances were available to HP employees at discount. When we compared prices, we found that even our builder wasn't able to get such good pricing from his vendors. So, we picked out the GE range we liked, and once again, had to select between only two models of hoods. We liked this one as the chamfered corners give it a little bit of a French Provincial feeling when compared to the angles of the other model.

Wondering about the range? Come back in a few days...