#sorry i will try make something new eventually. looking at my past stuff for inspo

[ritens]

that wasn't very pacifist of you [x]

[bestiepetedavidson]

Can I request hcs what Pete would do when you're standing in the middle of the night at his door, after a break up with your now ex boyfriend? Thankss ❣

yes! this game me inspo and i’m going to try to do a written-out story if that’s ok! :)

a/n: y’all this is the first story ish thing i’ve ever written so i apologize if it’s really bad/cringey! i feel like it’s extremely choppy but idrk how to fix it. constructive critism/suggestions/etc is ALWAYS appreciated! thank u! <3

song to listen to: i’m thinking adore you by bestie harry? idk it just fits hehe

tw: angst? i think? idk this is my first time writing this much lol. some strong language. ending with fluff :)

it was almost 3 am on a saturday night, pouring rain and thundering, and you were left crying on your now ex’s doorstep. you ran into your car, soaking wet. your boyfriend/girlfriend of 3 years, the person you were gonna marry- had just dumped you. they cheated on you with your best friend.

you had no one to talk to and nowhere to go. you’re pretty introverted, and the only people you really had were your ex-best friend, your ex, and your friend pete. and pete’s friends too, technically. they were mainly his friends but you would all hang out together, none of which you felt comfortable enough to go to.

you called pete- no answer. he probably still hasn’t left 30 Rock. but anyways, he had a lot on his plate. you continued to bawl as tears rolled down your cheeks and your mascara smudged underneath your eyes. you broke down and you couldn’t stop. he/she broke your heart into a million pieces in the matter of seconds. the past 3 years of your life had gone to waste.

you decided to just drive. you didn’t have anywhere to go because you were staying with him/her. you just drove around aimlessly for 20 minutes, still crying the whole time. then, you got a phone call. “pete”, your phone read. thank god. quickly, you pulled into a random grocery store’s parking lot. you picked the phone up and your bluetooth connected to your car.

“y/n” pete said. he sounded tired.

“yeah?” you responded, still crying.

“what happened? is everything okay?”

you tried to explain what had just happened, but you were too much of a crying mess for him to make out anything you were saying.

pete, confused, told you “y/n, i’m sorry, i can’t understand what you’re saying”. he took a deep breath, and continued. “do you want to come over? i just got home from work. we can talk it out”. his voice sounded worried

you agreed and hung up, and set your google maps to his apartment address. you started to blast a random spotify breakup playlist and drove.

~

a little later, at around 3:40, you finally made it. still soaking wet from the rain, you took the elevator up to his floor. you had somewhat calmed down, but you looked like you’ve been through a trainwreck. you knocked on pete’s door and he opened it to see you in your current state. the moment you saw him you just broke down, and he pulled you into a hug without saying anything.

so there you two were. just standing in the middle of the building’s hallway, hugging. in the middle of the night. he didn’t care that you were getting him and his clothes wet, and he didn’t care that he couldn’t go to sleep. he was simply focused on you and what was going on. he softly rubbed your back, and every time you would start shake uncontrollably again, he’d just hug you harder.

eventually, he suggested going back in. “y/n, let’s go inside and sit. you can tell me what’s going on and i’ll do my best to help.”

he held the door for you to go in, and you walked in and sat on his couch. he sat right next to you and there was a moment of silence before he decided to speak up. “hey.. y/n look at me. please.”

his words only made you cry more. he place his hand on your chin and slowly lifted it, giving you a slight “please tell me what’s going on” smile.

you took his hand off of your face and held on to his thumb. you were luckily able to get a hold of yourself and explained to him what had just happened, crying in between sentences. he didn’t take his eyes off of you for a second. he stayed there and listened to absolutely everything you had to stay, his thumb still in your hand. by the time you were done, any trace of makeup that was still on your eyes was a done deal, and it was all smeared on your cheeks. he took a deep breath and gave his opinions.

“wow.. y/ex/n is a fucking scumbag. no like seriously, what the actual fuck. who would do that? and especially to someone like you.. y/n you deserve so much better than that piece of shit. fuck him/her.”

you cried, and responded with “no, he/she’s right. i wasn’t worth it and y/bsf/n is so much better fit for him/her. she’s so much prettier and smarter and just better”

pete took a second. “y/n that is so fucking wrong. you can’t say that about yourself. you are beautiful and smart and amazing in every single way. anybody would be lucky as fuck to date you.”

you simply shrugged, he knew that he couldn’t technically change your mind and that you weren’t in a state to really believe that, so you just let it be. he took both of his hands and cupped your face.

“you are perfect.” he tried to wipe your cheeks with his thumbs but it only made things worse, spreading it all across your face. you looked across the room at that large mirror he had hanging on the wall and went “ah”, making fun of the way he made it look.

“hey, at least we have matching raccoon eyes now” pete said, smiling. to that you giggled, and he responded with “gahhh, there’s that smile i love”, as he hugged you again.

still sniffling but now with a smile on your face, you whispered “thank you” in his ear.

“anytime. and listen, you don’t get to talk about my best friend like that.” he responded

sending him another smile, you went to his bathroom to wash your face.

best friend, he said. nothing more.

while you still loved your ex boyfriend/girlfriend, you always secretly had a crush on pete. it was ever anything you would’ve acted on though. first of all, because of your friendship. you wouldn’t want to ruin the way things were. second, because you were dating someone. you loved them and you wouldn’t just cheat... but apparently they would. and did. third, you had just had your heart broken. you were in no state of mind to just go and admit your crush. but god, was it tempting. and it’s not like if you were to, you would want to start dating him. he most likely wouldn’t like you back, and even if he did, you wouldn’t want to date. you learned that you needed to take things slow, and pete knew that about himself too.

you walked back out, and you noticed that pete was in the kitchen, making tea. he knows that you love it. he saw you glaring and smiled, going “what? you love it.” you started to giggle because pete is absolutely not a tea person, but the gesture is just so cute. “shut up,” pete jokingly went, “we’re watching spongebob to help calm you and you’re sleeping here tonight”

“oh petey! how you’re just the sweetest!” you mocked him, smiling at each other.

you went to his closet to get a bunch of blankets, and soon enough, y’all were sitting & cuddling on his couch, watching spongebob on his couch, drinking tea, and cuddled up in a multitude of blankets. you were still worn out from sobbing and very tired, but. it was the perfect comfort spot. he always knew what to do. he was your comfort person.

he started smoking a blunt, (that’s pete for you) and he offered if you wanted a hit, but you declined. smirking, he decided to put it out. after an episode, it was already 4 am. you knew he was tired and so were you, so you suggested going to sleep, but pete insisted that y’all finish the episode. neither of you were really paying attention but it was kind of just playing in the background.

pete starts talking about random stuff going on, life stuff, making little jokes, the SNL show that he just did, etc etc. he’s sitting back on the couch and you’re on his side, head on his chest. you’ve cuddled platonically before so it’s nothing new. you’re both watching the screen and going in and out of conversation. at some point, you lift your head up off his chest, and you just stare at him while he’s continuing his story. he doesn’t really notice you getting up, and continues to talk about a recent standup he did.

watching his face, his jaw moving, talking, the way he speaks and the way his voice sounds, something changes in you and you feel the urgent need to kiss him. he notices that you’re looking at him. he turns his head and looks down at you. the second he notices that you’re staring at him, his words slowly fade out and he just looks into your eyes, forgetting what he as saying before. you’re still in his arms, but your head is up and you’re just staring at each other. there’s about 5 inches between your faces, and your heart starts racing. his does too.

“pete” you quietly whisper.

he softly presses his lips into yours and you kiss him back. his hand runs through your hair. his lips are perfect and it’s like you two were made for each other. the kiss lasts for like 10 seconds, and he slowly pulls away. you’re both at a loss for words, and you’re still staring into each other’s eyes. pete, breathless, quickly glances that the digital clock underneath his tv.

“wow,” pete says. “i’ve been waiting for as long as i can remember for this to happen and it happens at 4:20,” slowly creeping up a smile.

“i kno-” you start to respond, when you fully realize what he just said. you cackle out and can’t stop laughing, neither can he.

you pull him back into you as you’re both still giggling and you softly make out for a little longer. eventually you fall asleep in his arms, right on his couch. with spongebob still playing in the background :)

i hope u enjoyed my very first mess of a story <3 requests are open!

🤍🤍🤍

[wandas-sunshine]

The Muse’s Dance - Part 1

Summary: Steve is a fine arts major, (Y/N) is a dance major. Their meeting wasn’t supposed to be anything big, but Steve is sure he’s found his new muse, and (Y/N) is suddenly convinced that maybe she doesn’t have to choose between her career and a relationship.

Pairing: Steve Rogers x Reader

Word Count: 4497

Warnings: Nude modeling, this is sickeningly sweet, tooth rotting fluff. Smut in the next chapter

A/N: This is gonna be a little mini-series for you guys. Three parts plus an Epilogue. Song and dance inspo for the girls’ showcase piece is here. Please please please tell me what you guys think because I am seriously in love with this concept.

Classes had ended a couple hours earlier, but students were still milling about the academy hallways. Steve had been in one of the art studios in the visual arts building, desperately trying to finish part of his project for the big winter showcase coming up. He was almost getting somewhere, but his progress was cut short since he’d promised Nat to meet her before dinner at her and Bucky’s place.

That’s how he found himself wandering the dance wing, side stepping out of the way of a few girls strutting down the hall like they owned the place. Around the next corner, there was a pair of girls showing each other complicated foot work that would have had Steve tripping over himself. He glanced down at his phone once more.

‘Meet me in studio 22B’ The text from Natasha read. He was already running late, and he’d most certainly left early. But eventually he found the dance studio she’d told him to come to. He slipped quietly through the door. Music filled the small room as the trio of girls danced in front of a wall of mirrors. He tucked himself into the corner like his presence would disrupt their rehearsal.

He watched curiously. He’d seen Natasha dance a million times, she was amazing. The girl opposite her in their little v-formation, one Maria Hill, was easily as good. She’d been dancing with Nat since they were pre-teens. But the dancer between them was a mystery. A stunning, seductive, completely enchanting mystery.

She moved with such grace, such sensuality, that he almost felt like he should look away. But he didn’t dare. There was no way he’d ever forgive himself if he stopped watching her. She had him blushing to the tips of his ears, and his heart was damn near beating out of his chest. Even as the music stopped, Steve struggled to look away. She could’ve been a supermodel, a goddess even. Her skin was flushed, and her hair was slipping into her face. And the smirk on her lips was downright sinful. She was his new favorite work of art.

“Enjoy the show, Stevie?” Maria teased, grabbing her water bottle and taking a long drink. Steve’s crystal blue eyes snapped away from the girl and over to Maria, and he cleared his throat like he’d been caught in the midst of something absolutely awful. He was sure his cheeks were flaring as red as Nat’s hair, Then the musical giggle from the mystery girl’s mouth nearly turned his knees to jelly.

“Yeah! That was...wow, I mean...you guys were…” He stammered before sheepishly nodding and praying to whatever god may be that his point had gotten across so they didn’t ask him to clarify. His eyes wandered back towards the girl. Her hands were on her hips, and her smile was bright enough to light up an entire auditorium. Then that smile tugged into a critical pout. Even so, she was stunning.

“I need to emote more,” She turned and picked up her towel, wiping away the sweat that clung to her skin. “I have to keep working on it.”

“We’ve been working on it for hours.” Maria scoffed. Natasha sighed and glanced at the time. She was already leaving twenty minutes later than she’d planned. She crouched down at her bag, putting her things away and lifting it onto her shoulder.

“I really have to go. We promised Bucky we’d be home for dinner.” She explained, nodding towards Steve. Maria had already started her cool down stretches.

“I have a date in a few hours. Have to get cleaned up.” Maria announced, twisting herself into positions that had Steve flinching. “Sorry, babe. You’re on your own.”

(Y/N) huffed softly. So much for friends. She was never going to make it in the real world if she couldn’t get her stupid routine right for the end of semester showcase.

“That’s alright. I’ll work on my own for a bit.” She insisted with a smile. Steve hardly knew her, but he had a feeling she’d work herself half to death if they left her there alone. He wasn’t big on the idea. 

“You better be out of here by dark.” Nat warned, giving her the dangerous glare that Steve had been on the receiving end of one too many times. 

“Yes ma’am.” (Y/N) agreed quickly. Before Steve and Natasha were out of the room, she’d started the music up again.

As he walked alongside Natasha, Steve fidgeted with the pencil he’d tucked behind his ear. Nat didn’t say anything, just waiting for him to ask the question she knew was coming.

“Hey, Tasha, who was that girl back there with you and Hill?” He asked finally. Natasha smiled knowingly. There was no way to miss the way he looked at her, like he just wanted to look at her for the rest of his life.

“That’s (Y/N). She’s majoring in dance too. She’s really good, but she just doesn’t see it.” Natasha explained. “She’s also super single. And perfect for you.”

Steve rolled his eyes. It wasn’t like the redhead ever managed to keep her nose out of his love life. She was even worse than Bucky. She’d tried to hook him up with half of her classmates at one point or another.

“She’s really talented.” He mumbled, his brain replaying the routine they’d been doing. He only sort of recognized the song. It was from Burlesque if he remembered right. Bucky’s sister loved that movie. “Is that for the Showcase?”

She nodded, walking ahead of him like she was worried that they’d be too late and Bucky would slaughter them. Steve took a few long strides to catch up once they made it to the apartment complex just off campus.

“How’s your piece going?” She asked as she unlocked the door and called out to Bucky that she was home. Steve scrunched up his nose.

“It’s coming along.” He answered, taking his jacket off and setting his bag down. “I have to find another model though. Hope bailed on me. That alone is going to take me another year.”

Bucky laughed from the kitchen where he was working on the meal. The three of them had these little ‘family dinners’ about once a month or so. Steve rolled his eyes and grabbed a beer from the fridge.

“I’m serious! Everyone’s so busy with their own projects that nobody has the time.” He took a drink and leaned back against the counter.

“You could ask (Y/N).” Natasha suggested with a smirk. She watched proudly as he blushed a bright shade of pink. Usually Steve was completely professional when it came to his art, but the idea of asking (Y/N) to be a nude model for him had him flustered.

“I’m sure she’s busy with her own stuff. I’ll figure something out.” He insisted. But there was absolutely no way that Natasha was going to let it go that easily. She had a plan.

By the time (Y/N) got home, it was well past dark. She was exhausted, and sweaty, and still felt like she wasn’t  doing her number justice. Part of her was wondering if she was just lacking the confidence. She had heard it a million times growing up, that she had the technique down pat, but that it would never be outstanding until she was confident that it could be. She was never very good at that part.

When she made it into her dorm, her roommate Wanda was running lines, as she most often was. (Y/N) did her best not to distract her, setting all of her things down and plugging her phone in. She was in desperate need of a shower, her skin still sticky with dried sweat.

“Hey, how’s your number coming along?” Wanda asked with her usual cheery, sweet tone. Truthfully, Wanda was the only thing keeping her sane with the showcase just a month away. (Y/N) groaned dramatically.

“The number is going to be the death of me.” She sat on the edge of her bed and ran her fingers through her hair. “Not to mention that I haven’t made any progress whatsoever these past few hours. All because Nat’s hunky friend had to come in and be all cute. Threw off my groove.” She crossed her arms and huffed.

“Maybe you’re just stressing yourself out too much. You probably just need a little break.” Wanda had never stopped saying that to her, and she never seemed to tire of reminding her constantly that she worked too hard.

“You know I can’t just...stop practicing.” She grabbed her shower bag and a change of clothes. “Practice makes perfect.”

“Passion makes perfect.” Wanda corrected as her roommate headed for the showers. (Y/N) rolled her eyes. How many times had she heard that?

The shower did nothing to ease (Y/N)’s anxiety, though it did wonders for her sore muscles. She returned to her dorm with every intention to listen to Welcome To Burlesque on repeat and run the choreo in her head until she fell asleep. However, a few new texts changed those plans. She swiped them open and felt her nerves build again.

‘Hey, remember when you had to bail on Pietro’s dance and I covered for you? And you said that you owed me one?’ Natasha had sent. (Y/N) definitely remember. She’d caught some awful virus that had her puking her guts out every half hour and she’d promised Pietro that she’d be his dance partner for a choreographing class he was taking. Natasha had saved the day and stepped in. The next text made her eyes go wide.

‘How do you feel about nude modeling?’

She bit down on her lip. This was not going to end well and she knew it. But Nat had been there every time she needed someone to save the day, and she really did owe her big time. Not to mention she could use a good confidence boost. What did she have to lose? Besides maybe a few hours of rehearsal.

‘Nat, what are you getting at?’ She questioned, curling up on her bed.

‘I have a friend that needs a model for his showcase project. Thought maybe you could help him out.’ Her answer came quickly and (Y/N) hesitated. What the hell was she getting herself into?

‘Send me the info and I’ll be there’ She decided before she had a chance to back out. She’d never modeled for anyone before, and definitely never in the nude. And for something as important as the showcase? But if she could dance in front of hundreds of people, she could do this too.

The next day felt like it crept on almost painfully slow as she sat through her classes. She was supposed to meet this guy on the other side of campus 20 minutes after her last class. She shoved her things into her bag quickly, still in her workout clothes from her jazz class.

Truthfully, she’d only been in the visual arts building once before, and that was during her freshman campus tour. She wandered the halls, searching until she found the right door. One glance at the time and her worry set in. Shit, she was late. She pushed the door open, startling the man working intently inside. She flinched and dropped her bag.

“Shit, sorry. Did I make you mess up?” She asked frantically. “I’m so sorry I’m late. I couldn’t find…” Her words trailed off as she finally looked up at the man she was modeling for. And Steve was staring right back. “Oh, hi again.”

“Hey, hi...you’re...you’re my model?” He asked nervously. She felt her heart sink and her stomach twist into knots. She knew this was an awful idea. Nervous thoughts began swirling through her head. What if she wasn’t good enough for his vision? What if she was going to ruin his piece? What if he just hated her and didn’t want to waste his time drawing her?

“You alright, doll?” He quirked an eyebrow at her and she jerked out of her thoughts, nodding stiffly.

“Yeah. I’m just a little bit nervous. I’ve never been someone’s model before.” She confessed with a smile that had Steve’s stomach in a tizzy. “But I owed Nat for all the times she’s saved my ass.”

Steve nodded and returned a smile that would have knocked her right off her feet if she’d dared to look at him straight on. He was so handsome...not that she had much time for pretty boys and their big blue eyes. She had a career to focus on.

“It’s alright. We’ll go at your pace. You won’t be very much fun to draw if you aren’t comfortable.” He stated sincerely, motioning her over. She ventured forward and he nodded towards a pale pink robe. “You can change into that and I can show you my concept for the piece.”

It wasn’t an order, simply an offer. She nodded and picked up the robe, stepping just out of his sight to strip down and change. Like the true gentleman he was, Steve made no attempt to peek at her as she changed.

Once she had put the robe on and folded her clothes into a neat little pile, she pulled up a stool beside him. He had been working on a piece that had her stunned into silence. He had clearly put a lot of effort into the image. It showed a naked girl draped elegantly over a chair. It was so beautiful that it was hard to look away.

“Like it?” Steve asked. She turned to glance at him, a nervous smile nudging the corners of her lips.

“It’s incredible. You know, I had been worried about being drawn by someone, but you just might manage to make me look beautiful.” She nudged his shoulder and giggled quietly.

“Making you look beautiful is easy.” He barely whispered the words, and she expected him to be teasing her. When her eyes met his, her stomach did a somersault. There was nothing but sincerity and admiration behind the ocean blue of his eyes. Her cheeks burned how.

“Thanks, Steve.” She murmured. There was a long quiet moment before she spoke again. “So, how about you show me that concept?” That seemed to snap him out of whatever trance he had fallen into. He reached for his sketchbook, carefully turning pages. She caught short glimpses of several sketches. One of a young woman she didn’t recognize holding a baby, then one of Natasha and her boyfriend curled up with smiles lighting up their faces. One showed just Bucky, then Maria’s boyfriend Sam (not that either of them admitted they were together). Then, much to her surprise, she noticed a small sketch of her doodled into the corner of a page. One more page was flipped, and Steve offered it to her.

He showed her how the five pieces would come together. An overarching theme of head vs heart ran through them each.

“See, it starts almost completely black and white when she’s caught up too much in her head. Then when she gives in to her heart, she’s in full color. I want that to be you.” He turned his head to look at her with a grin.

Ever since she had come into the picture, Steve’s idea had really come together. It was becoming something he thought he could be proud of. Almost like she was his muse, the missing piece. She was the heart he needed to win against his anxious head. 

“No pressure,” She scoffed playfully. She was beyond honored to be the star of his masterpiece. She wasn’t even sure she deserved it. “Do you wanna...get started then?” She glanced at the table sitting in the middle of the room and shyly twirled the tie of her robe around her finger.

“Yeah, sure, yeah. I’m ready whenever you are.” He stammered quickly. He’d been staring at her again. Had she noticed? Not that people didn’t regularly stare at her. She was a dancer, and an absolutely breathtaking person to begin with. He figured she had people throwing themselves at her feet.

“Steve? How do you want me to…” She vaguely motioned towards the sheet covered table. Steve quickly snapped back into reality. His stunning blue eyes met hers for a second before he slipped into artist mode. He didn’t look at her like she was an object there for his pleasure, didn’t appraise her naked form. That was always something that had plagued her mind when she thought about nude modeling. Instead he let his eyes wander over every inch of her before making his decision. He stood up and walked over with a sort of confidence she hadn’t seen in him before.

“Go ahead and lay down on your back.” He instructed gently. She nodded and lifted herself onto the table, laying back and looking over at Steve. His eyebrows were knit together, leaving a cute little crease between them as he examined her once more. For a split second, he was chewing on his lip, and her mind was wandering in totally unprofessional ways.

“Here, bend this leg up, and go ahead and twist your hips just…” He tapped her knee, then her hip, doing as much as he could to position her without putting his hands on her. She did as he said, propping her leg up and angling her hips away from him. “Then stretch your far arm up like you’re grabbing something out of the air.”

She looked over at him again before doing as he said, stretching for some imaginary object that was just out of her reach. He rested his hands on his hips before nodding a little.

“Would you be able to arch your back a little more and hold it for me?” He asked. She adjusted her post, arching off the table. It wasn’t the most naturally comfortable pose, but it was nothing she couldn’t handle. Steve had the brightest smile on his lips, like everything was finally falling into place the way he’d hoped it would. And oh what she wouldn’t give to make him smile like that every single day.

“Do you want me to turn on some music? Sometimes it makes people more comfortable.” He asked. She shrugged a tiny bit.

“Sure, anything you’d like is fine.” She agreed. Steve quickly pulled up a playlist and started the music. She didn’t bother prying her eyes away from him as he set to work.

He was beautiful, truly exquisite. She couldn’t help the thought that it was almost disappointing that Steve was the artist and not the subject. The way his lips pursed as he worked had her fantasizing. Nothing filthy, but that was almost worse. She imagined curling up beside him and watching him draw, or looking over to him after running a number and seeing his precious little pout while he worked on whatever his newest project happened to be.

“You’re really passionate about your art, huh?” She observed quietly. He looked up and flashed her a little half-smile. Her heart fluttered dangerously.

“Art has gotten me through a lot of rough times.” He admitted. “I was a real sickly kid. Couldn’t usually go out and do much. So I got good at art.” He was quiet for a second, seeming to zone in on a particular part of the piece. It was strange for her to imagine the hulking mass of muscle before her being small and frail as a boy.

“You’re incredible, really. It’s an honor to model for your showcase piece. I know it’s probably really important for you.” She talked, letting him focus his energy on his art. But she noticed the smile beginning to curl onto his lips.

“Honestly, I think you’re the prettiest model I’ve ever drawn.” He told her, a pale pink crawling up his neck. “I mean, with your clothes on too.” She bit her lip to fight off her giggle. A hint of the flustered guy from the day before threatened to break through his calm and collected professional demeanor.

“Thanks, Steve. That’s sweet.” She mumbled. God, did he have to be so damn charming? Relationships were supposed to be the last thing on her mind. Especially with her next big performance just around the corner.

“You know, you’re really talented too.” Steve spoke after a few beats of silence. He remembered what Nat had said about her not believing she was a good dancer. (Y/N) sighed softly.

“You really think so? I know everybody says this, but I feel like I’ll never be good enough to make it in the big leagues.” She confessed. Steve paused his work. He tried his hardest to hide the disbelief that hit him.

“I really think so. Don’t tell Tasha, but I think you might be the best dancer I’ve ever seen.” His words eased her worries for a moment and set her cheeks aflame.

“Thanks. You’re really really kind. It’s sort of nice just talking to someone. I’m always so preoccupied with rehearsals, and classes, and auditions. I guess I never really take the time to slow down anymore.” She had been hearing the same thing since she decided in elementary school that she was going to make a living being a dancer. But being there with Steve gave her a new perspective. She really sort of liked the clarity he brought her.

“Maybe what you need — you can relax the arm — is someone to help you out. You know, remind you to take a breather every now and then.” He didn’t look up. His eyebrows furrowed together again as he tried to get the muscle definition of her thigh just right. She hummed thoughtfully.

“Yeah, maybe.” She was always wary of letting people into her life. Too many people meant a whole slew of distractions. But if slowing down always felt so nice… “Maybe you can help reel me in sometimes.”

Steve beamed, suddenly overwhelmed with pride at her willingness to let him into her little world. Then he nodded.

“I’d be happy to try.”

The two didn’t talk much after that, just continued their slow, drawn out conversations with replies every few minutes until the sun had gone down and Steve was satisfied with his progress. He set to packing his things up, and (Y/N) stood up and put her clothes back on.

“Thank you for doing this.” He turned to look at her as she pulled her shirt and sweater back on. Suddenly he wasn’t in professional mode. He was just Steve Rogers, a man alone with an intimidatingly beautiful woman. He fiddled with one of his pencils, sending her another glance. “I think you saved my ass on this one.:

She flashed a blinding smile and let out a bubby laugh that nearly melted him. She was incredible, and Steve was beginning to regret that one time that he’d told Bucky that he didn’t believe in love at first sight.

“I’m sure that’s not true. You’re a talented artist, you would have figured something out.” She argued, crouching to tie her shoes and doing her best not to meet his gaze for fear that she wouldn’t be able to make herself look away.

“Maybe, but you made it a hell of a lot easier.” He agreed as she finished with her laces.

“Happy to help. But it’s late, I should get back before my roommate starts to worry.” She told him reluctantly. He nodded his understanding and picked up her bag, swinging it onto his broad shoulder. She tipped her head and lifted an eyebrow in response.

“You said you needed to get home. And my ma woulda had my head if I ever let a lady walk alone in the dark. I’m not gonna let her down now.” He explained, clicking off lights around the room. She smiled and tipped her head down so that maybe her blushing wouldn’t be noticed. She needed to get a grip. He was just a guy! A handsome, talented, charmingly chivalrous guy.

“Alright, but only because I wouldn’t want you getting in trouble with your mom.” She gave in, but Steve had already known she would. He flicked off the last light as they headed out the door.

The walk to the dorms wasn’t a particularly long one, and a comfortable silence fell over the pair, both of them lost in their own thoughts. (Y/N) gave up on trying to keep her mind from wandering. She imagined Steve walking her home after her performances, or after a nice dinner date. Then she was imagining him kissing her goodnight slow and sweet before she went inside. She looked over at him only to find him already looking her way.

He’d put his backpack on properly, her bag hiked up on his shoulder, and his hands tucked into the front pockets of his paint stained jeans. He hadn’t even noticed the way he was simply staring at her. He was too busy thinking about the way she carried herself. Even when she was just walking, she was so graceful, each step was taken with such conviction that it was clear she was a dancer. She made existing look like a flawless performance. He wouldn’t mind doing this more often. Walking her to wherever she needed to go, carrying her bag just so she wouldn’t have to be bothered.

When they reached her building, (Y/N) led the way to the elevator. She pressed the button for her floor, and neither of them spoke. Despite all the open space, they stayed close to one another, their arms brushing with every movement. He let her lead the way to her door where he reluctantly passed her bag back to her. She settled it on her shoulder and looked up at him.

“Do you live off campus?” She asked, pulling out her keys. Steve nodded and she held out her hand. “Let me give you my number. If I can’t walk you home I can at least make sure you get there safe.”

Steve didn’t dare argue with her. He simply handed over his phone and watched her plug in her number. She lifted the device, snapping a picture of him and texting it to herself before giving it back.

“Text me as soon as you get in, understand?” She threatened playfully, poking her finger into his very...very firm chest.

“Yes, ma’am.” A chuckle rumbled from his chest, and she appeared satisfied with the answer. She unlocked her door and nudged it open.

“Goodnight, Steve.”

“Night, (Y/N). I’ll talk to you when I get back home.” He promised. She nodded and closed the door behind her before he caught sight of her lovestruck smile.

Oh, she was in deep.

[cyn-00]

Moreid one shot, 6 - "way past that"

Season 7, episode 20 "The company" (the one where Derek finally finds his cousin Cindi after years she had been missing but her family had no proof of her death. At the very end, when Derek, his sister Sarah, his aunt, Cindi and her son finally gather and hug)

We love some unrequested long ass but hopefully not boring fic. Basically a follow-up to the episode, definitely not one of my best works...

Also bad news: I've just started season 8 which is the one where Reid has that thing going on with Maeve, so A) I'm gonna be depressed and frustrated for a whole ass season + B) there probably won't be any Moreid inspo here and there so I'm sorry but I probably won't write fics during this one :( I could still do some throwbacks to older seasons though, I'll see what my big (?) creative (?) brain can do

Read it on AO3

-------------

Reid was watching the scene through the blinds of the room him and the rest of the team were, chatting and finally relaxing while reordering their things, ready to go home.

He could clearly see, even from far away, that Morgan had teary eyes - but they weren't tears of sadness, nor anger. They were ones of joy and relief. Derek's aunt was hugging Cindi's kid, Derek was talking with his sister Sarah.

The young genius was totally immersed. He was so moved and happy that Morgan could finally let go of all the rage and uncomfort he had been burying inside for the past days - to be fair, those feelings had been there for months - he didn't even realize he was lopsidedly smiling to himself, like an idiot.

Everyone was getting out of the room with their hands full of stuff.

"You better pick your things up cause I wanna go home and sleep, and I'm pretty sure everyone agrees with me when I say that we won't regret leaving you here..." Emily said to him, jokingly.

"Yes ma'am, we do agree." Rossi responded.

"Mh mh." Reid mumbled, without shifting his eyes an inch from the view, barely hearing what the others were saying.

JJ sighed, resigned to the fact that he would probably be in there for another 30 minutes. "Alright. Bye Spence!"

-

The room was now empty. Reid saw Morgan looking at the team leaving, like he was awakened and brought back to the real world.

His eyes finally met Spencer's for just a split second, and in that moment Spencer immediately stopped looking, like he had been caught doing something he shouldn't have been doing.

He coughed and clumsily stood up from the desk he was sitting on, starting to pick up his stuff with no specific order. Just to make it look like he had actually been doing something for the past 10 minutes, instead of watching Morgan like it was the most entertaining thing ever - it kinda was, to him. No matter the context.

Derek knew he had been looking all along. He simply didn't wanna look back at him, in the attempt to avoid drawing his sister's attention to Spencer as well.

Mission failed. 

"What you looking at?" Sarah asked after a few seconds of him being clearly distracted while she was talking.

Derek's eyes shifted back to her, raising his eyebrows and opening his mouth like he had something to say; but no valid excuse came out.

His sister turned around and saw it. She saw what had been distracting him for the past 5 minutes: Doctor Spencer Reid, sorting out his stuff in the other room. Now that the others had gone away leaving the doctor alone in there, there was nothing convincing enough Derek could say to dissuade her from gathering that he was looking at the pretty boy in the other room.

Reid looked up at the two for a second and waved at them, wearing his usual cute-kinda-awkward smile.

Sarah waved back, giggling at how geeky he was. "So...you gonna invite the guy over to dinner or something? Ever? In your lifetime?"

Derek sighed, still looking at Spencer. "I wish. It's not up to me, I don't think he'd be comfortable with that."

"C'mon why not? We've loved him since day one just like you did." she paused, recalling a memory she wasn't sure if sharing with her brother. She quickly decided on doing so.

"As a matter of fact, Desirée was the one who predicted something was up with you two just by the way you talked about him." she smirked.

"...I always talk about every member of my team. I talk about Penelope a lot. And Emily." Derek answered, frowning, like he took what his sister said as an accuse of some sort.

"Yeah, but that's different..." Sarah pointed out.

Derek didn't answer: she wasn't the first person telling him that he'd always talked about Spencer in a "different" way, since the beginning, when he hadn't even figured out his feelings for him yet. He'd come to the conclusion that he probably did that without even noticing.

There were a few seconds of silence - enough for her to notice that Derek had got back to looking at Spencer. She affectionately put a hand on his shoulder. "Come on. Go."

"I-I'm sorry sis, he's been trying to ignore me for the past two days on purpose cause I've been nervous all the time and I've been acting like a dick, honestly-"

"I know, I know, I imagined that. You owe him. We're fine." she gave him a kiss on the cheek and headed closer to her aunt and cousin, to intrude their conversation and give Derek a reason not to feel guilty about leaving her like that.

-

Morgan entered the room. Reid heard his footsteps but didn't - couldn't - turn around: he was stretching over the table to try and reach a pile of documents. He managed to pick it up and started to browse through the papers distractedly, while turning around to face him.

"You know, I was thinking that maybe-" He STARTED talking.

Derek cupped his boyfriend's face in his hands and kissed him impulsively, making Spencer breathe out a faint moan of surprise and chaotically put the files back on the desk right behind him. It took all of his physical strength and the remaining amount of attention he wasn't paying to that hot kiss not to just drop the files on the floor.

He wrapped his arms around Derek's waist and leaned closer. Without even thinking of how inappropriate that must have looked, his hands snaked under the other's t-shirt, lightly stroking his back.

The moment he felt Spencer's soft touch on his skin, Derek got goosebumps all over his body. He put a hand on the back of Reid's head, involuntarily messing his hair up, and started leaving quick kisses on his jaw and behind his ear. He knew that was a huge turn-on for him. Exactly the same way Spencer knew how huge of a turn-on was for Derek when he ran his fingers up and down his back - or abs; oh, the abs.

Spencer gasped, keeping his eyes shut. In the attempt of trying to stay on his feet, he put his hands behind him, trying to hold himself onto the edge of the desk.

Wrong move: his hands knocked off the pile of papers, spreading them all over the table and the floor. That was what - maybe luckily - interrupted the dynamic, which was clearly proceeding toward a not-suited-for-work direction.

Derek stopped teasing Spencer and rested his forehead on his, breathing heavily.

"...shit " Spencer whispered, chuckling.

"Maybe I should've closed the door." Derek said, shaking his head.

"And the blinds." Spencer added, nodding his chin toward Sarah, who immediately jerked her face the other way because she'd been caught peeking at them with the corner of her eye, from the lobby of the police dept. Derek snorted and shook his head - again.

Spencer sat on the desk, letting his feet wiggle 10 inches from the floor; still absent-mindedly looking at Derek's family through the blinds. He was sure that they had to get moving, but also didn't want one of the only moments of intimacy the two got during the day to end; even though said "moment of intimacy" eventually turned out to be Spencer yawning every 30 seconds, approximately.

Derek silently stared tilt-headed at his boyfriend with a smile printed on his face, for what seemed like an eternity, laying his eyes on everything they could reach: his gorgeous side profile; his slightly furrowed eyebrows; the golden curls that almost reached his shoulders; that absolutely nonsensical but all the same weirdly charming way he used to wear his wristwatch too loose over the unbuttoned cuff of his shirt, instead of beneath it like normal people; the collar of his wrinkled pinstripe button-down, too large to adhere properly to his slim neck. Derek rested his hand on the side of that neck of his, half entangled in his hair, caressing the very edge of his cutting jawline with a thumb.

"You know," Morgan interrupted the silence and Reid finally looked up at him with his big, brown eyes.

"Sarah asked me if I was gonna invite you to dinner one day."

Spencer smiled awkwardly and raised his brows, surprised "She did?". Derek nodded.

"Wow- I'm- I'm flattered..." he stuttered in response, half-heartedly.

"...but?" Derek got serious.

"There's no 'but', it's just- you know. I thought your family saw me as the weird and awkward kid, just like...well, everyone, really- which is totally true by the way I don't mean to play the victim or anything."

Derek laughed. "Yes, they do."

Reid frowned. Was there something he wasn't getting?

"But they love you like that."

Spencer looked away, smiling shyly. Derek cupped his jaw in one hand to make their looks meet again - he understood that Spencer loved it when he took his face like that by how he immediately gave him those eyes, every time. The adorable eyes. It worked like magic.

He bent over to whisper in his ear.

"I love you like that."

Spencer was already closing his eyes and melting in Derek's warmth, expecting one of his kisses. But Morgan wanted to tease him a little bit, so he backed away from him and walked toward the door with a smirk on his face, leaving there both Reid AND the mess of files they dropped on the floor.

"Wait!" Spencer squeaked when Derek was already on the threshold of the door.

"Nuh-huh pretty boy I ain't gonna help you with that mess. Besides: it's your fault, it's not like I pushed you or anything" he said jokingly, still wearing that smirk that made Spencer's whole body blush.

"Yeah- no, actually, it's not about that, though you could help me since we're already late and it IS kind of your fault- frankly though, it's totally your fault, what did you expect me to do? You were utterly over me, physically-"

"Baby. I was joking. What was it?" Derek interrupted the flood of words coming out of his mouth.

"Yeah sorry, uhm" he paused, his brain trying to start working again after crashing for a second at the word "baby".

He kept his eyes firm on Derek's face with his mouth open - though no words came out at all - fidgeting with his hands like he always did, not knowing what it meant to stay still. Derek raised his brows in a way that meant: "I'm listening...?".

"Why- why aren't you mad?" Spencer finally said, choosing the simplest and less mistakable way to say it.

Derek frowned. "Mad? At you? For wha- wait, did you do something I should be mad about?"

"Nonono not like that it's just, I haven't really talked to you in the past few days. And I should have been there for you with all that was going on."

"You WERE there. Just like anybody else."

"Exactly, and I should have done something more, instead I acted just like anybody else on the team, but I'm not anybody else otherwise this- us, we wouldn't make sense... right?" he waited hopeful for his boyfriend's confirmation, but his expression remained the same. "So I thought you would feel betrayed in some way, I don't know if you do feel like that and you're not telling me to not make me feel...guilty, but- but anyway I'm sorry. I'm really sorry that I acted like I don't have any responsibility to you."

"Kid" Derek said softly. "we're way past the whole 'I'm here for you if you wanna talk' thing. I know that you are, and I chose not to talk about it more than we were already doing on the job. We both bear a responsibility to each other and we always both respect that" he paused. "You worked on the case, you gave me space, you hugged me when I needed a hug. That's all that matters to me and you know it inside that big brain of yours."

Reid looked like he hadn't even heard half of the talk, gazing at him with heart eyes.

Morgan paused again, expecting some sort of answer, which never came. "What? One minute you're all sorry and the next you're looking at me like- like that." he raised his hand to point toward the face he was making. "What's up with you?" he asked jokingly after a few seconds of silence.

"So we're way past that uh?" Reid quoted him timidly, like he had to make it official.

"Waaay past that." Morgan answered with an eye-roll, playing along, knowing where that was going.

"So we're...serious. Aren't we?" he questioned rhetorically, biting his lip and looking down to fake-concentrate on fiddling with the hem of his sweater vest.

"Yes, genius boy, we're serious."

Spencer nodded shortly and turned around to hide his smile; finally deciding to - once again: clumsily - pick up the files and randomly stuff some of them in his satchel, while he kept the others in his hand. If he had done that with any criteria at all, they would have all fit in the bag: that was what Derek was thinking, looking at his messy boyfriend try to un-mess things up; wondering if maybe he really should've considered offering a hand.

-

They both finally got out of the room, 20 minutes later, but Derek's family was still there. He stopped walking and grabbed Spencer's arm to make him do the same.

"Imma wait for Hotch, I'll catch up in a minute."

"Alright" Spencer nodded.

"Yeah wait, first I gotta ask you one last thing..."

"...sure" Spencer squinted his eyes, pronouncing the word slowly. Derek looked a teeny tiny bit nervous, which was unusual, to say the least.

"Does your mom know? About...us? About me ?"

Spencer grinned knowingly. "Why are you even asking, you KNOW that I tell her everything."

"...so...? "

"So I've been telling her about you since the second I met you." he paused, giving him his sweet smile. "She knew where this was going before I did." By 'this' he clearly meant them.

Derek looked down at his feet, biting his bottom lip in the attempt to contain a chuckle.

Spencer wanted to kiss him. But they were in the main lobby, there was Sarah not so far: he didn't know if Derek would be okay with it.

He hesitated a second to look around and then gave him a quick peck at the corner of his lips, so quick nobody noticed. But as soon as he pulled away a little, Derek cupped his face and kissed him way deeper. In that moment, Reid understood that Morgan really didn't care about showing everyone that they were a thing. Not even his family. He was more than just not ashamed of it - he was proud.

Spencer could have gone hours kissing like that, but he stopped. "Alright- you're gonna make me drop the files again" he mumbled breathily against his lips, smiling.

Derek laughed and shook his head, finally letting Spencer go and following him with his gaze as he walked away.

-

He looked over to his sister: she was smirking. She had been looking at them all along. Nice.

Derek scratched the back of his neck and turned around, already regretting kissing Spencer in front of them: he could only imagine the amount of embarrassing questions expecting him at the next family dinner. To which he would also have to take Spencer with, at that point.

Hotch finally got out of an office where he had been talking with God knows who about God knows what for the whole time Morgan was with Reid. He always had to do the boring, bureaucratic stuff.

"Morgan. Have you been waiting for me this whole time?" he asked, in the most ironic tone he could pull off - which wasn't THAT clearly ironic.

"Yeah- no, actually, I was- nevermind. We good to go?"

"I was kidding. I know you were talking to Reid."

Derek nodded, looking at his feet, like talking to Reid was something to keep secret. Problem is, 'talking' wasn't all they'd been doing in the other room for 20 minutes.

Hotch frowned: he sensed something was wrong - mistakenly. "Is everything alright with you two?"

"...why are you asking? Should I know something?" Derek returned the frown. Apparently, that day people thought it was real fun to say confusing things.

Hotch sighed. "Reid wanted to apologize to you for a thing. He only hinted it to me but I can guess what he was talking about."

Derek breathed out, relieved. "Yeah. There was no need to apologize but you know how he's done. We're good." he answered, trying to hide a smile that said: we're REAL good.

"Thank God. When something is wrong between you two it's a mess." Hotch smirked with an eyebrow raised, using that same "ironic" tone from earlier, which came off as such only to the team because they knew him enough to resign to the fact that that was the most ironic it could ever get.

Derek snorted, smiling, without asking for an explanation: he knew exactly that the way the whole team functioned on the job got fucked up big time when there was tension between Spencer and him.

Hotch casually patted his shoulder. "Alright, let's get on the jet already. They're all probably asleep by now."

[i-rove-rock-n-roll]

I just found my writing from elementary school. (Ages 6-10 mostly, though some of this came later)

Such hits as

Raindeer Trouble (corrected by the teacher as Reindeer Trouble) a one page story where Santa’s reindeer are sick, then have a miraculous recovery, all taking place a week before Christmas. I wrote it in either first or second grade, if memory serves me correctly (which I doubt it is)

Monkey Madness-written maybe a year later? Basically there’s this witch that hates the superhero Underdog’s guts (I had just seen the live action movie and loved it) and her plan was to make a super powered monkey to hypnotize to do her bidding. Her end goal was to become world leader and have everyone dress up as scary monsters for Halloween, rather than superheroes and “something else good and sweet”. Whatever that means. Then she started kidnapping people with the monkey’s help and turning them into real monsters. Eventually the monkey starts asking questions, like, “can you carve carnivorous cotton candy into kittys (kitties)?” (Idk wtf that even has to do with the rest of the plot but he gets sulky cause she doesn’t make him a cat at one point) There’s more gems in this one, plus a really wacky fight scene. This one was most definitely second grade, since a few words are in cursive, which I had just started learning. I also remember drawing a “cover” to this one, but idk where it is now.

The next one is Super Horse Heros (Heroes). I basically wrote down the stories my gram used to tell my sister and I when we demanded bedtime stories. An old horse wants a new life, and has to do 3 good deeds before his fairy god horse will turn him into a ‘“unisus” (unicorn/Pegasus combo). After that, the unisus saves a bunch of horses who were kidnapped and shipped to a glue factory. Then they became the Super Horse Heroes, saving children lost in cornfields (aka my sister and I) and flying off into the sunset.

I also found 2 essays in this folder-one about The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand, and the other a 12 page paper on the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe which I used to apply to college.

Also a drawing of the Moirae and a spinning wheel that isn’t half bad.

Back to the writing!

Let’s see...a type written version (I used to have a typewriter before SOMEONE broke it one time when I moved) of Reindeer Trouble.

Oh! Here’s a gem! It’s titled: A Bad Toddler Finds a treasure at a popular amusement park. He finds literal treasure, fame, fortune, and an old boot.

The Adventures of Pretzel Man! With a little drawing in the corner. (I used to have a Nabisco pretzel looking doll, that was the inspo) He sells pretzels by day apparently and also fights crime. His enemy in this story is creatively called Taffy Laffy, who turns people into Taffy Zombies, and—

This story is unfinished. WHAT? I was actually wanting to know the end!

Ugh. Anyway, let’s continue

This next one is called Turkey Terror: a turkey’s life from my point of view. Basically this kid gets turned into a turkey (but they still have their own head??) it’s also 2 days before thanksgiving. The turkey kid’s name is apparently Sheldon, who makes friends with a chipmunk named Chippy...who is a total backstabbing liar leading Sheldon to an ambush in a cave, where he gets a bullet to the head, only to wake up and find it was all a dream...

WTF PAST ME?? WHAT—

More drawings in here, terribly proportioned gangster from the 20s...some drawings I did of phantom of the opera (I, uh, copied some drawings I liked by other artists at the time with the sole intention of just sticking them on my wall because i apparently forgot what a printer was)

Drawings of flowers...drawing of my dog’s eyeball for whatever reason...

Heaven or Hell: Gateway to Another World (keep in mind I was going based off of cartoons but I think my complete lack of understanding of religion is why I would up majoring in it)

More writing, some based on the imagery I got from songs I was listening to... one page thing I apparently wrote about the death of Jesus (???) once I had seen and been awestruck by Michaelangelo’s Pieta (on screen unfortunately, I’ve never seen it in person)

A paper with only one line on it saying “Mrs. Jenelle Hartson née Deveroux was always the first to tell anyone she was a crazy old bat”

Okay.

Oh no! Well, not no, but well—

Basically scrap paper bits of To Kill A Mockingbird from Boo Radleys POV. The whole thing would up being like 15 pages and was turned in for a school assignment. I think I scared the teacher with how long it was since he only asked for 2-3 pages. I have the whole thing on here somewhere in all it’s terrible glory if any of you want....

Bingo! Found a bunch from a wip I really liked like, 6-7 years ago! (So early high school) Scientist named Phineas Lancaster develops a way to jump between universes, is being pursued by the government, and winds up running into himself, but a deadbeat version who dropped out of college after a horrible accident. Let’s see what gems are in here....

“Phineas Lancaster, resident bum and professional alcoholic of the sprawling town Rock Falls, woke up feeling as if he had been slammed into by a bus. He hadn’t, but for a minute he’d thought he’d wandered into the middle of 32nd Avenue during Rush hour. Again.”

(Phineas, realizing he was kidnapped by a dude he doesn’t realize is himself from another universe) “His captor smiled at him in what he must have thought was [a] friendly way. Phineas was now more irritated than before when he noticed the flashing white of his captor’s teeth. ‘no way those are real’. He scowled at the man. ‘He looks like he popped out of a freaking toothpaste commercial’ he’d been abducted by a real like infomercial buffoon. Lovely.”

“I love your place.” He hated it. “Very homey.”

“He’s even got a nerdy voice, Janine. I can’t have a nerd for a twin.”

“Say hello to the guy that decided to kidnap me. He had some sort of weird spaz attack and, being the kind and loving soul I am, couldn’t just leave him in the middle of the desert to die. Ergo, he’s here.”

“I got us a lift from a very nice gentleman who is currently searching for Glenn Miller. He gave me his card in case I either found Glenn or if I need another lift, since he’s going to be in town for a few days.”

“I bet you’re a dentist. Dentists are evil.”

(When drunk Phineas not smart phineas is abducted by agents)

“All I wanted to do was stop by the Dollar Store for some Gummy Bears. I just had to get kidnapped again. Yay me, I could set a record.”

“Aaaand cut! Try it again, maybe with some more threatening looks this time, you might make me wet myself if you try hard enough.”

“Gee, i don’t know, I think I was too busy running for my life to ask, ‘I’m sorry, do you want to exchange numbers so we can do this again sometime? Maybe meet for tea?’”

“How ever did you make such a realistic looking doohickey?”

(One Phineas to the other)

“I totally got mom’s humor. You got dad’s shitty ability to make a person die of boredom.”

Road tripping to Golden Earring (and trying not to murder Phineas when he starts singing)

...guess I got a lot of stuff to play with now! Happy early birthday to me!

[smolfangirl]

A little fresa story V

This is it. The last fresa part. It’s been taking ages to finish, but it’s here now, and I might be a bit emotional. I have lots of people to thank and credit tho, so I’ll save my breath :D

Thanks and/or credit go out to:

@huffletiika for the date night idea and the patience with my attempts at Spanish

My roommate for the actual, very true quote about answering a phone

@miris-xo for, well, everything

A gif from the TV show Bones that I can’t find rn even though I tagged it for this purpose :( but it was my inspo for the scene where Matteo comes home

Also @lutteoheart for the basic idea for the last scene with Aurora, I changed quite a bit, whoopsie

And, dear mortals and bots, one last time: @ac-ars and @sky-girls used the name Rory first. I used my own brain to end up with this name (also because of my roommate who is obsessed with Gilmore Girls and keeps trying to talk me into watching it), which is why I didn’t give them any credit.

Word count: 5.6k

///

“Can I say something weird?” Her voice is nothing more than a whisper. Luna leans against Matteo’s chest, so close to him that their conversation moves on quietly and calm. His hand softly ruffles through her hair while their favorite movie flickers over the TV screen. He ordered their favorite pizza and even lit some candles to set the mood for this special evening.

But somehow, Luna isn’t feeling any of it.

“Weirder than your comment last week? What was it?” Matteo pretends to think, the amused snort impossible to miss. “It’s strange when you pick up the phone and someone answers?” Her idiot fiancé chuckles and wiggles away from the finger she tries to poke him with. “Hey, you have to admit that was priceless. High-quality comedy, even.”

Luna grunts. Moves away a bit, until he pulls her back into his arms with a laugh as warm as her hands when she hides them in the sleeves of his hoodie. “Okay, okay, I’ll let it go. What did you want to say, little moon?”

With a sigh, she stares at the empty crib by the sofa. “I miss her.”

Glancing up at him, she discovers a sad smile on his face. “I miss her too.”

“Does this mean we’re a horrible couple or just good parents?”

Matteo rests his chin on her head, releasing a heavy breath. “I don’t know… but is it too bad if we drive to your parents and pick her up?”

She wants to answer immediately, she wants to grab her jacket and the car keys and walk out of the door. Her leg already twitches towards the ground, because she misses her little sunshine this much. She wants to hold her in her arms and cuddle with her until one of them falls asleep.

But something holds her back.

Something; the dreams, the ideas, the plans that added up for this night during the past days and weeks. It doesn’t matter that none of them received the luxury of turning into reality. As long as she can indulge in his voice when it drops as he’s almost breathing the words, as long as his touch fuels her heart, Luna is fine with whatever they do in those few sacred hours alone.

Or that’s what she thought.

Because in this moment, the house feels empty. Lifeless, almost. Every decision, every minute is about their daughter since she was born, she’s the fixpoint they both revolve around. However, now that she’s being spoiled by her grandparents tonight, Luna’s mind runs all over the place like a Ferris wheel on the loose.

“I don’t know,” she finally mumbles. “I miss her, but this is our first date night.”

“I don’t know either.” A pause. “You know what’s funny? Gastón was so sure we couldn’t keep our hands to ourselves, but we haven’t even made out like lovesick teenagers yet.” His lips hover over her, way too pointed. He’s being dramatic, like he loves to be, but it makes Luna giggle, and when she catches a breath a minute later, her shoulders are less filled with tension.

“How about this, chico fresa? You can try to kiss me, and in an hour, we’ll see if we still want to give up and get her?”

Matteo raises an eyebrow, the hand in her hair frozen. “Try to kiss you? Are you planning to resist me?”

“Well, there’s some popcorn waiting in the kitchen…” Luna explains while she struggles to get up. However, his grip on her tightens and with his best smug grin, he leans in to press his mouth on hers, a slow, savoring kiss that says, ‘I know you’re not serious about resisting me’. The second one steals a sigh from her and by the third, she surrenders to the soft movements of his lips.

///

When Matteo lets go of her to finally prepare the popcorn, the last minutes of the movie play. Luna sits through the credits without seeing them. Her mouth tingles from kissing him endlessly, but also from smiling so much. It almost hurts – or maybe that’s just her stomach protesting for a snack or two… (Since when does she feel snacky only two hours after dinner?)

Eventually, she gives in and follows the sweet smell into the kitchen.

Wrapping her arms around Matteo’s waist, she asks him how much longer they have to wait to get the bag out of the microwave.

“Always so impatient, munchkin,” Matteo teases her, without giving her the satisfaction of an answer. She snuggles closer to him and grins, “Except when it comes to marrying you.”

He shakes his head. “Rude and uncalled for.”

“Aww, I’m sorry, my chico fresa. But see, I wanted to talk to you about that anyway, and you just gave me the perfect set-up.”

In a smooth twirl, he faces her to lift her on the counter, so they’re eye to eye. Luna hurries to send him a smile, because if she wants to avoid one thing, it’s any doubt in his mind about her love for him. “I was thinking, what if we, hypothetically I mean, hired a wedding planner? One of these fancy people with lots of connections and the weird talent to make literally anything happen, no matter how extraordinary. Like these tv shows? I mean, we could still focus on Rory without having to postpone the wedding again. It might strain our budget a bit but,” she says, although Matteo doesn’t let her finish.

“You know the budget is no problem,” he replies before he caresses her cheek.

The noise of the microwave cuts through the silence, mixes with the obnoxious pop song from the movie credits. Yet his gesture alone turns this moment into something precious, intimate. Like the popcorn or the DVD-player don’t matter. Don’t exist.

“If you think a wedding planner can help us, we’ll hire one,” he adds.

“Really?”

“Of course.”

This time it’s her who pulls him close for a kiss. And when the microwave gives off a little pling and he attempts to break apart, she waves him off, whispering the popcorn can wait.

Eventually, they stumble back to the couch. Too lost in each other, it’s a miracle already that they’re not dropping their snack left and right. Luna selects her favorite scene from the movie but looses track of it quickly when Matteo starts feeding her and rewarding her for every bite, with a peck on her hand, her shoulder, her neck. She pays him back by throwing a piece of popcorn up in the air for him to catch.

He throws one for her next. Back and forth, it soon turns into a competition filled with laughter until her stomach hurts and her lungs plea for more oxygen.

“Try one more time,” Matteo instructs her, barely breathing after her last failed attempt. The piece of popcorn he catapults into the air hits her nose and falls on her cheek from where she catches it with her tongue. “Not bad,” he presses out in between more hysterical giggles, and in revenge, Luna threatens to hide some sugared corn in his hair.

Shrieking, he ducks. “Mercy on me, please!” he begs, hands lifted in surrender. (Luckily for him, the bowl is almost empty anyway.)

“Hmmm…” Slowly, Luna moves closer to him until his breath tickles her skin. “What would I get for giving you peace?”

“Always so demanding, little moon.”

She rests her head on his chest again to glance up at him with her best puppy eyes. “That’s not an answer, Matteito.” For a moment, he returns her gaze, speechless. Then, a smile unfolds on his lips. “You know, I could show you the final cut of the music video. But only if you promise to not get any of this sticky stuff close to my hair.”

“Deal.”

///

Contigo todo cambió

Veo un mundo diferente

Dejé de sentirme solo

No cerraré mis ojos nunca mas

Estás siempre en mi mente

///

“What do you think?” His voice cracks from all the excitement. His left leg shakes a bit, and the way he looks at her, Luna can’t help but think of Simón’s dog when he watches his leash being taken off the shelf.

She chuckles. “Honestly?”

“Always.”

“I bet you my left skate that there’s at least one gossip magazine that thinks the sunrise after the moon means you dumped me for some other girl. But other than that, I absolutely love it. Your ass in those outfits will have the fangirls go crazy.”

Dumbfounded, Matteo stares at her. His face mirrors the turns and jumps his brain takes, and if Luna concentrates enough she can see smoke coming out of his ears.

A few seconds later, he catches himself and grins slightly. “That sounds like a safe win for you. And horrible news for Rory. Who would even be the one to tell her?”

Silence.

“Oh my god.”

“Did we really just forget about our daughter?”

Helpless, Luna throws a glance at the clock on the wall. 9pm. Way past bedtime for little Aurora, and almost two hours after their mini-breakdown as well. “I think we did,” she whispers.

Matteo looks like he bit into a lemon. “We’re such horrible parents.”

“Oh god, we might be,” Luna agrees, cheeks paler than a moment ago. Guilt takes over, she can’t believe she didn’t think of their chica fresa for one second while goofing around with Matteo, when usually not a second goes by without her daughter being in the back of her mind somehow.

But when her parents bring her over not even half an hour later, a part of her decides this has been the best date night in easily a year.

///

It’s not the right weekend to sit alone in a hotel room with an overpriced bucket of ice cream from the room service while crying to the rhythm of the rain on the window pane. There are other weekends, other days for Luna to sob into tissues until they cover half the floor.

This isn’t the weekend. This shouldn’t be it.

But here she is, lonely yet not entirely alone, while everyone important and famous in the skating community is celebrating in the lobby. If she takes a deep breath and remains silent for just a few seconds, she can hear them shouting and cheering from downstairs.

In a mindless gesture, her hand rests on her belly. Maybe her absence will cause rumors, a drop of gasoline in a flame that’s already smoking. No, it will definitely cause rumors. Since her planned break from the work as Argentina’s most promising skating trainer leaked to the press, they’ve been watching her every breath. Day for day she wakes up to new theories and emails begging for an interview, and the desperate need for a vacation and more time for her family are the nicest speculations the media had to offer.

And the ones closest to the truth.

Luna sighs. If Matteo was here, maybe she’d have a laugh over all the stupid gossip, or maybe she wouldn’t be so exhausted from crying. But he’s back home while she’s here, and there’s nothing she can do to stop the tears from rolling over her face.

Without wanting to, her mind jumps back in time to a competition years ago, the last test leading up to her first ever world championship, where she found herself in a situation painfully similar to her current one.

Back then, she sat in a hotel room just like now, crying on the floor. Back then, she doubted everyone and everything, and mostly herself. She leaned against the bed, sobbing and shaking until her eyes burned and throat dried out. Because of Matteo, because of a fight with him and the break they hastily agreed to take. She cried because she missed him, and because her skate at the final rehearsal for the most important sport event of her life went terrible. Catastrophic, even. Jumps she couldn’t stand, turns she began too late for the music, a fall.

Leaving the rink, she didn’t even know how to look her trainer in the eyes.

And then she cried because that just made her miss Matteo more.

(A week later, Luna had cried once again, tears of joy mixed with the sadness that he wasn’t with her for her victory and that he hadn’t even send a text.)

Now, it’s different. There’s been no fight, no competition and still… the result remains. Luna cries because she misses him, she misses her sunshine of a daughter, she misses all the little drama coming along with having a young family.

With her hormones all over the place, indulging in a distraction seems impossible. No colleague, no idol in the world could make her feel better now. This mood swing demands to be felt, so she’s staring at the hotel ceiling, trying to come up with a solid reason to call her husband during dinner time. Maybe he’s breaking the rule of no phones by the table to wait for her number to light up on the screen?

Luna still ponders over his opened contact when a call comes in.

Matteo.

“Chico fresa, hey, oh my god, what a surprise!” Her tongue almost trips over the letters, earning her an amused chuckle from the end of the line and another teardrop on her cheek. “Hi, my little moon, how are you?”

Her sniff ends in a deep breath ending in a sob, and she’s not sure she can speak. “It’s so nice to hear your voice, you have no idea how much I miss you and… and I…” She stops, blowing into a tissue.

“Luna, hey, are you okay? Hang on, are you crying right now?”

She pauses. Nods. “I miss you, chico fresa. I want to be home, with you. With…”

“Mommy?!” A high-pitched voice filled with excitement creaks through the speaker. Hurried little footsteps follow, and Luna wonders how a heart can both heal and break more at the same time. “Mommy! Mommy!”

“I’ll put you on speaker,” Matteo announces and a second later, Luna can hear their little chica fresa giggle. “Hello Aurora, darling!” She keeps her voice steady, tries to smile. Her baby girl doesn’t need to deal with her homesickness, besides, smiling is almost easy when she imagines Rory’s face beaming with happiness. “Is everything okay? Is daddy being nice to you?”

“NO,” Rory shouts at the top of her little yet powerful lungs, making Matteo wince. “Aurora, you're hurting my feelings here.” Then, her husband declares, “Just for the record, that is still her favorite word that’s not gibberish. She’s a liar.”

A hint of a laugh hushes over Luna’s mouth. Her mood already lifts, the weight on her chest fades and as her hand finds her belly again, gently stroking it, she thinks that perhaps she’s done crying for today.

Little Aurora, however, isn’t as happy anymore. “Coglio!” she yells at her dad, once, twice.

Luna frowns. She waits for a second, allowing her brain to catch up on the meaning, and when realization hits, it’s not so surprising anymore that Matteo remains silent.

“Matteo?”

“Yes, my love?” A casual tone, too casual in fact.

“Was that supposed to be an Italian curse word?”

Silence. Then, a groan. “I used it for Gastón once, okay? Once. He annoyed me so much with his stupid puns and it just kinda… slipped. But since then, she keeps repeating it, while ‘please’ is just too hard for her to say, I guess, since she only heard that one about a million times.”

“You’re…” she takes a breath to scold him, half-serious about the annoyance she’s intending to show. But he cuts her off with a smirk that she can hear all through the phone, which sounds dangerous enough all on its own. “No, no, no, don’t act like you’re all innocent here. I first thought I’d let it slip, you know, to be a nice husband, but now you asked for it, chica delivery. Would you mind explaining to me why your daughter keeps mumbling something that sounds suspiciously like baby talk for your favorite curse word, hm? Because I definitely don’t use it, so you better not give me shit right now.”

Speechless, Luna listens to his ramble.

Matteo has a point, of course, maybe she used cabrón one too many times in front of her baby girl. But to be fair, she never expected him to find out…

“Don’t you have anything to say to your defense?” her husband inquires, chuckling.

She clears her throat. “I mean, I can still blame Simón for teaching her naughty words. You’ve got nothing on me, chico fresa.”

“Ah, that’s where Rory has the whole lying thing from.”

“While it’s your fault she’s as dramatic as you are. If you could keep your dignity while throwing tantrums, you would never stop.”

By the time Matteo gasps in pretended offense, Luna’s grin deepens. The few days apart from him made her long for these silly banters more than she ever deemed possible. At home, not a day goes by without at least one teasing comment in the other’s direction, and over the years she grew as used to it as to the comfort of his touch. Since she arrived here at the conference, stepped into halls too crowded to get reasonable internet connection to chat with him, it becomes more and more obvious to her how much they both enjoy gently mocking each other.

When Matteo begins to argue he’s not that dramatic, therefore his daughter can’t be either, said little troublemaker cries out. He sighs. “Can you hold on for a minute? She’s ready for dinner now and…”

“She won’t eat unless you sing to her?” Luna finishes the sentence. “I told you, she learned from the best.”

“Aww, thanks, babe,” he giggles in a pitched voice, before he pauses and adds, “She is so damn extra. Hm, you tiny troublemaker? Insisting on your demands like the cute diva you are?” In a sing-song Matteo tells Aurora how soon she’ll outdo every spoiled starlet he ever met in the course of his career, but from the content babble that follows, Luna figures dinner won’t be a problem for today. Or for as long as Matteo sings, really.

The next time her husband takes a short break from feeding their chica fresa and complains about Rory’s eating habits, Luna suggests calling his best friend. “You could ask him about spoiled toddlers, I’m pretty sure he can tell you a weird habit or two about Felicia as well.”

“Hm, yeah… no. This is really weird. And I’m not talking about the singing.” He sounds horrified, which brings back pictures of one particular evening where Rory decided to be extremely picky.

And a bit gross.

“Oh boy, please don’t say she wants to eat her veggies with chocolate yoghurt again.” With a glare into the ice cream bucket in front of her, Luna notices her dessert melted and now resembles that yoghurt way too much.

She pushes the bucket away.

“Nope,” Matteo replies, to which Luna breathes in relief. Maybe she can still enjoy her sugar treat, after all. “Trust me, this is worse.” (Or maybe not.)

Taking the spoon out, she licks it, while she wonders what could be worse than veggies and chocolate yoghurt. Nothing comes to her mind, although she’s sure Matteo will explain whatever it is in great, disturbing detail.

Of course, he doesn’t let her down. “Remember when you were full of pride that our baby will be half Mexican and half Italian and said that it will be so cool?”

“Oh boy, please, just make it quick. What did she do?”

“She put spaghetti in a tortilla. Or, forced me to put spaghetti in a tortilla for her.”

“Ugh, what? Gross!” Luna gasps, quickly covering her mouth with her hand. It’s not that late, but she isn’t exactly keen on provoking any attention from other hotel guests, or worse, be heard by the paparazzi lurking outside. Sighing, she gets up to close the window.

Spaghetti in a tortilla, that must be the weirdest and most cliché combination Aurora has come up with so far.

“I know,” Matteo says. “It’s such a disgrace to the pasta.”

///

They stay talking on the phone for easily an hour more. Matteo puts her on speaker as he changes Aurora into her pajama and with a smile, Luna listens to the lullaby he puts her to sleep with.

However, as nice as being part of the nightly ritual is, his silence warns her the moment he closes the bedroom door behind him and walks back into the living room.

“Luna,” he whispers, her name as fragile in the air as a floating bubble. “Are you okay? I didn’t expect you to be crying when I called you.”

“Yes,” she mumbles back. “I just missed you and it got a bit too much.” Laying on the bed, her legs dangle from the edge, draw circles into the air that give her thoughts a calm rhythm to think to. It’s a bit embarrassing to look back on all the tissues she wasted with her crying, especially when the reason was so… not exactly meaningless, but simple.

“Aww, little moon, is the convention that bad? That you can’t be three days without your favorite fresa?”

Luna snorts, although it comes out weak towards the end. “Let your pregnant wife be emotional, okay?”

“But you’re having fun, right? Meeting some cool people who you can show off to with your medals and titles?”

He’s only half serious, but sometimes, Luna wonders if Matteo forgets that she’s not the center of the figure skating world. So far Luna felt like the others were the ones impressing her, not the other way around. She got introduced to people who won everything there was to win, who competed in three, if not four Olympics, who dedicated their whole life to this sport since they were little kids. And yes, she claimed the title as world champion for a few years, and she’s infinitely proud of her Olympic gold medals. But she’ll never be close to achieving legend status like the skaters around her, and that’s okay for her.

“I am having fun,” she admits, quickly smiling, yet carefully as to not let it slip into her voice. “You know, it’s actually nice to be more than just your wife for once. No one really cares about you here, or only very little.”

No reply, not even a snort. Just silence.

“Your ego can handle that, right?”

///

When Matteo unlocks the door, he swears he’s going to fall on the sofa and won’t move again until it’s time to go to bed. Interviews tend to be fun, but Jazmín didn’t interview him, no, she interrogated him. Squeezed him like an orange for breakfast juice, and now he feels drained of every last bit of energy. Not even blasting his favorite songs on the ride back home helped to forget her over-excited laugh or the never-ending questions, about the meaning of each new song, about Luna, about his family.

Just the thought of having to promote this episode next week makes him want to delete every single social media account he has.

With a sigh, he slips out of his jacket and loudly announces to Luna that he’s back. No answer, instead, silence greets him. Perhaps she’s napping somewhere, wouldn’t be the first time, although jealousy stings him at the mere thought. Not only can Luna spend more time with their chica fresa, she also manages to doze off before dinner, yet doesn’t struggle to fall asleep at night while Matteo can only dare to dream about day-time naps.

If you ask him, it’s not really fair. (But he chose this, after all.)

He trots into the living room. Knowing his sleeping beauty, he needs a solid plan to wake her up, but all ideas fall short as soon as he discovers her on the couch. The view in front of him surprises him, charms him, all while a warm fuzzy sensation lingers in his chest.

He might have expected his girls to be asleep, but he didn’t expect them to be asleep together. Luna’s hair is spread out over her shoulders, head supported on the cushions and her mouth opened just enough to give his wife a peaceful (and maybe a little bit dumb) expression. On one side of her, Matteo spots an open book, little Aurora’s favorite, a story full of tiny adorable animals and terrible rhymes. Too many times did they read it to her until her eyes slowly fluttered shut, too easily can he recall those lines. But it doesn’t quite matter, not when his daughter rests against Luna’s still growing bump, snoring gently.

It’s the cutest thing he has seen all week.

They neither wake up from his soft hello kisses nor from the picture he snaps for the next family collage. Only when dinner warms up in a pan and the delicious smell of risotto fills the room does Luna join him.

“I didn’t notice you were home,” she mumbles, hugging him from behind the exact moment the baby decides to kick. Right into his back. It doesn’t really hurt, but Matteo winces anyway. “Damn, this one’s definitely a troublemaker.” A short kiss for his wife and he leans down to gently follow their little one’s movements. “Hm, tiny peanut? Hello to you too.”

“You know it’s weird how you say peanut when it feels more like a watermelon.”

He chuckles and checks how much the risotto heated up. While he feeds her a spoonful, he replies, “I’m not gonna call our baby a watermelon just because it’s more accurate. You were the one who suggested to wait with the name and all. So, peanut it is.”

“But why peanut? Why don’t you say… I don’t know, raisin?”

“Because raisins are gross, duh. They’re the wrinkly grandmas of grapes, I’m not eating that.”

Luna chuckles as she shakes her head. “You’re not supposed to eat our baby.”

“Sometimes I get the feeling you think I’m stupid,” Matteo pouts, earning him a soft pat on his cheek. It’d be a cute gesture if it wasn’t for her answer. “Only sometimes?”  

“Haha, you’re so funny, Valente.”

She sticks out her tongue at him.

Matteo sighs in surrender, then changes his mind. “So, since we’re talking names now, what do you think about Violet Drizzle? Or Sven Olaf?”

“Sven Olaf? Like from Frozen?” With the nod he gives her, his wife seems to realize where this is going.

She pops her finger bones like she’s about to step in the ring.

“Sure. Why not Misery? Or what about Ben Jerry? Unicorna?” Rolling his eyes, Matteo tries to shake off the laughter. Fails. Coming up with ridiculous baby names isn’t hard, he knows too many celebrities and their children, but he didn’t expect Luna to play along so quickly. (And fairly, so brilliantly.)

Within the blink of an eye, he follows her suggestions with five more. In the span of three minutes, they’re bickering like it’s the most important competition of their lives. Ideas are traded back and forth, and so is their laughter.

But none of their names clearly outdoes the others, and they’re both too stubborn to surrender. Except when he’s about to suggest a draw, Luna makes him laugh so hard he almost burns dinner.

His wife snorts, although the huge grin on her face gives her away. “Jeez, chico fresa, if you’re as careful with Fresa Risotto as you are with our dinner I might have to raise my kid alone.” Snatching the spoon out of his hands, she shoves him towards the sofa. “Why don’t you just go and wake Aurora up? She asked about you all afternoon.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he salutes before he caresses her bump one last time and leaves the kitchen, grinning. His daughter already blinks her eyes open at him.

She’s tired. Still tired and clearly confused and not quite landed in reality yet. Once the last shreds of sleep let go of her, though, she squeals and claps her hands in excitement. Just like her momma, Matteo thinks as he picks her up to press a kiss on her forehead.

Aurora beams with joy.

“Hello, my sunshine, did you sleep well?” When she babbles something that he assumes to mean yes, he asks if she wants to be a little airplane. Of course, Rory nods – she’ll never say no to her favorite game after all.

When Luna calls him for dinner, he’s still whirling his baby girl around and around and around.

///

“Did you call Simón today?”

He’s sitting in front of the couch, Aurora on his lap. Since her favorite toy disappeared without a trace, she’s been whiny, but cuddling with him distracts her enough to give Luna time to find it.

His wife nods. “Yeah, he sounded really excited to be back on tour. Greetings from Pedro, by the way.”

“Thanks. Did you talk to him, too?”

“No,” she replies, and sighs when Rory’s little plush cat remains nowhere to be found. “We weren’t on the phone for long, Simón seemed kinda… busy.”

Matteo sends her a look. Usually, they ended up chatting for hours especially on a day like this, with no concert in the evening. “Huh?”

His chica fresa plants her hands all over his face. When he kisses her little sneaky fingers, she giggles. “Come on, Matteo,” Luna meanwhile groans at him. “I told you about Emma and him. You said he obviously had a type and all. Now, if I could just find this stupid kitty…” Before he gets a chance to remember Emma, Luna waddles out of the room.

Matteo prays she finds the plush toy quickly. He wants his intel, after all.

///

She’s clumsy. Not normally, all this training to become a world champion wasn’t for nothing. But her bump makes it hard to navigate her own body sometimes, and she can barely spot her feet. Can’t spot them at all, to be correct.

So, of course she stumbles over the bright red plastic car on the floor.

Matteo blinks at her confused, then breaks into laughter. She tries to catch the kitten in her hand, almost catches it. Accidently throws it up into the air again, reaches out again. Ultimately fails, because it’s keeping her balance or the plush toy.

Her husband still laughs. “Don’t bother,” he manages to get out once she tries to bow down enough to grab it. (Her belly. Naturally. She feels like a walrus.)

But it’s not Matteo who picks the kitty up or presses it against his chest with a cry of joy. It’s her daughter, who must have escaped her daddy’s grasp and now clutches her fingers around the worn out plush. Dragging her regained treasure along, she crawls back to Matteo before she sits down to stare at Luna.

A frown appears on her forehead.

“What’s the matter, sweetie?” Luna asks. “I’m sorry I couldn’t find Mr. Whiskers earlier.”

Rory stares. And frowns. And stares. The grin on Matteo’s face slowly dies.

“What are you planning, fresita?” he whispers, although too late. One last skeptical glance and their baby girl tosses her cat into the air and watches it fall down.

Matteo is rolling on the floor. “I can’t believe I have two Lunas now,” he pants before losing his breath from all the laughter.

Rory beams with pride and repeats it a second and a third and a tenth time.

///

He makes it up to her with a massage. Their little sunshine is dozing off in her bedroom, their favorite show flickers over the TV screen and he even prepared a hot chocolate for her.

“Didn’t you want to tell me something about Simón’s new blondie?” he asks so casual that she’ll probably figure he’s been thinking about it for at least an hour.

Rolling her eyes, Luna gently slaps his arm. “Rude, chico fresa. Emma might be blonde too, but she’s not like Ámbar.”

“You still meant to tell me.”

“You’re right, I was.”

He presses a kiss on her neck. Maybe she’ll scold him for setting her up on a distraction without letting her finish, but her skin is warm and soft and he’s just a man who loves his wife a bit too much. (To his surprise, she even robs backwards on the couch until she lays against his chest.) “So,” he whispers into her ear, “how do I know Emma?”

“She spent a few weeks in the Roller back during my last year of school, remember? I think they met up during the promo gigs or something.”

“And they’re good together?”

Luna tilts her head for their eyes to meet. She smiles. “I’m pretty sure they’ll marry each other one day.”

His hands wrap around her bump. Carefully traces the baby’s little kicks, while he thinks if Simón was half as happy as he feels, the guitarist would get incredibly lucky. “You believe he might overthink what he said about not wanting to get married ever?”

“Sure,” she smiles, again, and steals a kiss from his lips. “That was after Ámbar, after all. Emma is different. And you know him, he’s an old romantic.”

“Like me.”

“Nah, you’re just cheesy.”

Offended, he gasps. But in the totally not fake dramatic argument that follows, they both think how they wouldn’t trade this for anything else in the whole wide world, because as long as they’re together, everything will work out fine.

[isabellcs]

welcome 2 her twisted mind....tw murder & general . crazy on main activities... 

BACKSTORY 

so she was born in valencia, spain which is a pretty costal town hehe...and she was raised in an orphanage ! by nuns ! like she was dropped off at their doorstep as a baby and all the nuns would say about her mom was that she was a coke head and a whore so JDHDGDF they didn’t know anything about her dad though and isabella was honestly cool with that she didn’t care ... like as a little girl she would just dream up wild fantasies abt her mom being this crazy evil lady like the nuns pictured her and it actually ... comforted her ?? she was a weird kid . she was super interested in religion just bc she loved the idea of cosmic punishments and all these big dramatic things that happened in the Bible and she asked a lot of questions but only abt like the violent stuff so the nuns started to worry abt her also isabella creeped all the other kids out like she’d try to play with them but her version of playing games was like .. oh i found some rat bones in the attic let’s make a necklace (: or like she’d make up little chants in what she thought was nonsense and then weird things would happen afterwards so the kids started calling her a bruja which means witch and isabella was just like damn . tough crowd fuck u guys too !!

anyway eventually all the kids she grew up with started to get adopted or put into foster homes and the orphanage was like super strict so if u weren’t getting put into a home u couldn’t even really explore spain like they were just cooped up there and when she was around 15 she just .. snapped like she wasn’t getting any offers for adoption bc she creeped everyone out and she had a bad reputation at the orphanage and the nuns didn’t really treat her nicely and she just wanted to escape ! so she waited and then one day there was this insane thunderstorm and it knocked out the power and isabella just . poofed out the window and never looked back .. and so a new chapter in her life began ..so growing up as a kid she was like ... not really a bad person so to speak but she didn’t have the same understanding of morals that everyone around her did like in her mind things were morally okay if she didn’t feel bad about it but ... she didn’t really feel bad about anything so she was like well cool i guess it’s all ok then ! so she was 13 literally no money just on the streets of valencia trying to scam her way to barcelona and she did some ... questionable things in the process.. may or may not have robbed some spanish aristocrats.. among other things .. but by the time she was 14 she made it to barcelona so what does it matter ! anyway that’s where she got her snake literally on the first night in barcelona this drunk dude coming home from a bar tried to attack her and this snake came out of nowhere and just . bit him and he died and then the snake just curled around her legs and started following her around so she was like guess this is my life now . sick BSHZHDFshe does her own thing for a while with her new snake just being a genuinely weird teen in spain no family just making up lies about where she came from to scare people also robbing ppl to be able to find places to sleep obviously mingling with like .. no good ppl bc who else is gonna talk to a creepy girl with a pet snake JSHSGDD 

then on her 16th bday she meets this man and he knows her name and she’s like fuck . did the nuns send u and he’s like im gonna tell u everything abt ur past if u come with me NOW and she’s like ok (: so they stay at this little inn and while he’s sleeping her snake wraps itself around his throat and he wakes up and she’s like ur gonna tell me everything rn or ur gonna die so he was like well shit . u come from a coven of witches that used to live in vermont and were hunted down one by one and killed as punishment for an incident that killed a whole town of innocent ppl so ur mom ran away to spain and gave u up for adoption to save ur life but they found her and she died and now it gonna die if u stay in spain and she was like huh . and didn’t kill him /: and the next day they started there two year journey...traveling all around europe before finally coming to Vermont to meet with the last surviving witches from her covenwhatever so they meet and isabella is like huh so tell me abt what you guys did that killed all those ppl that sounds cool and they were like ... uh no that’s not important rn ? what’s important is that u get ur powers it’s almost ur 18th bday so for like a week she’s with them getting to know them... and the man that brought her there disappeared like she starts to realize he didn’t even stay to see the other witches and when she mentions the guy that brought her they were like WHAT and she was like yeah thought u guys knew him...and they were like oh my god we have to leave rn after ur bday tonight and she was just like fine whatever where are we going and they were like as if we’d tell u and . that made her angry /: so they do the ceremony signing her name into the book and she gets her powers blah blah she can’t find her snake so she’s like .. looking for him and she wanders away and when she comes back .. all the witches that were from her coven that did her ceremony are all dead and the man that brought her there is back and he’s like hey isabella and he’s holding her snake and she’s like so ur the one that killed everyone right ur the one that was hunting the coven down and he’s like yeah sorry  and he gives her back the snake and he’s like don’t worry im not gonna kill u (: i have big plans for u !so once again she’s like i guess this is my fucking life now... 

and she’s honestly not even that sad about her coven like they kinda annoyed her and she’s curious about this witch hunter dude bc it reminds her of all the stories she used to love from the Bible abt divine justice so he brings her to ... new york baby ! she’s 18 she’s got her fresh new powers and this guy starts training her which was ... not always a smooth ride there were lots of accidents and lots of “accidents” but he’s teaching her obviously shaping her in a way she knows is only gonna benefit him but she needs the training so she just goes along with it .. also at the same time she’s going fucking CRAZY in New York shes just causing so much trouble this guy is honestly sick of her so after three years of him trying to tell her what to do and he doing the exact opposite he’s like u know what . im not ur father i LITERALLY killed ur whole family maybe i should have killed u too and she’s just loving it she’s like yeah u probably should have ! and he’s like what the fuck she’s crazy she’s enjoying this...so he just gives up again and he’s like cool so here’s what you’ve been training for . there’s a coven of witches here and we’re gonna kill them and she’s like im sorry what and he’s like did I stutter . so she kinda has ... no choice but to follow him and help him out but the gag is . she was pretty annoyed with him .. nothing too serious but he was a MAJOR buzzkill you know so when they’re about to kill these witches she’s like hmm you know what ... how abt i just kill you instead ! and he was like are u kidding and she’s like nope /: and BOOP . she kills him ! BSGSGDGSF and the witches that he was gonna murder are so grateful she saved them they’re like hey you don’t have a coven ur alone why don’t u...go to witch school...and she’s like what’s that so they tell her abt . blackwater academy  and that’s how she ends up there...at the age of 21....hehe

PERSONALITY

if u have seen killing eve . i 100% based her personality on villanelle......if u havent seen killing eve WATCH IT .. ALSO took inspo from elektra from daredevil, katherine from tvd & faye from the secret circle xxx  basically isabella is like...she understands ppl have emotions but ... her brain just doesnt work the same her empathy is fucked so 99% of the time shes doing stuff genuinely not caring abt who it affects except for herself...also ... SHE LOVES FUN ! literally the worst thing u can do is bore her . she plays games folks ... shes dramatic ... doesnt take anyone seriously except herself ! shes just .. shes something ! oh also . shes a top so if u wanna raw her ur gonna be a bottom and u will enjoy it thank u gn ! x

[teencorpse]

Best Friend

Sweet Pea x Reader

Requested by: @caitmcneill

Song inspo: Best Friend - Rex Orange County Summary: Sweet Pea and y/n have been best friends forever and tbh the cutest couple ever, but some people at Riverdale High could disagree.

a/n: oki doki here’s my first request yay!! I hope you like it, sorry if it’s not quite what you wanted, I had an idea and thought the simple stuff was super cute and makes a relationship strong. (p.s. requests are open, so feel free to give me something to write!)

(gif creds @always-klaus-forever-kol)

The teenage serpents were overjoyed when news that Southside High was being shut down. Aside from the prejudice that came with it, most were excited about finally getting an education. People would often think that just because they were hoodrats and gang members, that they couldn’t care less about school. It’s easy to say that my boyfriend Sweet Pea, was the most enthusiastic about the news. We’ve been friends since the beginning of our time. There’s countless pictures of us together in only diapers, covered in food, or him pulling on my hair which resulted in a very upset toddler me. Since then we’ve had our own fan club, rooting for us to end up together. From our parents, to random people on the street, to our best friends. Until one night at our very first high school dance. He had been my date since we were both going alone, and it only made sense. It wasn’t until a slow song came on, and we both had no idea what to do. It took me about thirteen years for me to realize how undeniably cute my best friend was. I wasn’t sure if he felt the same way, but there was only one way to find out. I stood up on my tippy toes to place a very quick, nervous kiss on his lips. Still avoiding his eyes, I looked literally everywhere else, until I felt him kiss me again. As two fourteen year olds, it was just as awkward as it sounds, but since then we’ve been inseparable. Our parents weren’t surprised when we announced that we were finally dating. His parents won the bet that was going on between the two pairs. Go figure.

Fangs and Sweet Pea bounded through the graffiti littered doors of Southside High. Their boyish excitement nothing but contained as they showed their eagerness. Toni and I followed behind, snickering at their antics. Sweet Pea turned around, opening his arms out wide for me. I walked into his warm embrace before he swung me around until he was holding me bridal style. I let out a string of laughter, seeing him this happy made me happy.

“This is it baby! We’re outta this place!” He shouted, walking down the stairs.

“Good riddance, you filthy cesspool!” I yelled, my head falling back, still in Pea’s arms.

We laughed and joked around for awhile with a couple other serpents. I wasn’t a part of the gang, but we were all still extremely close friends, and we all looked out for one another.

When the announcement got out which school’s Southside’s former attendees were going to, relief but also a small tinge of anxiety resided in my friends and I. Tensions were already high between the Serpents and Bulldogs. Archie had basically broken his bread with his small rivalry with the Serpents via Jughead, but the same thing couldn’t have been said for his friends. Archie and his girlfriend Veronica (according to Jughead) Had set up a registration desk for all new incoming students, but Reggie Mantle and Cheryl Blossom had other plans.

“Listen up, ragamuffins! I will not allow Riverdale High’s above average GPA to suffer because of classrooms that are over crowded with… Underachievers,” The redhead began. I stole a look at Sweet pea, seeing him already growing frustrated. “So please, do us all a favor and find some other school to deface with your hardscrapple ways.” The lovely, and welcome hello from Riverdale High’s resident popular girl did not settle with Toni, as she stepped forward.

“Why don’t you come over here and say that to my face?” Toni challenged. The crowds got closer together, ready to pull back members of their respective parties if they got too close.

“Okay guys, everyone, can we just put our Northside-Southside differences apart and start over? A new slate?” Archie suggested. He was trying to subdue the fire that was slowly building in everyone of us.

“You don't speak for the Bulldogs, Andrews,” Reggie added “And need I remind you, these greaser-snakes showed up at your place trying to kick your ass.” Reggie stepped forward, trying to intimidate the group of serpents. His tactic was working because Sweet Pea pushed through crowd ready to ignite a new flame.

“Happy to finish what was started” Pea said sarcastically before Jughead pulled him back. I grabbed his hand, pulling him back towards me. My other hand reached up and started rubbing his back slowly, calming him down.

I wasn’t sure how it worked or why, but we found the fastest way to cool him off was just by rubbing his back. He took in a few quick breaths before returning to the group, not wanting to start too much trouble on the first day.

“Seriously y/n… Just think long term” Veronica said. Over the past couple weeks we had grown more accustomed to each other, having a lot of classes together and a mutual friendship through Jughead. “All I’m saying is that the whole bad boy thing is going to be out of style pretty soon” She added. I tried to my fullest capability to keep from snorting some kind of ruthless response. Sure my boyfriend wasn’t perfect, but at least he isn't illegally buying guns to take down a serial killer.

“Veronica… I understand your concern, but I love Sweet Pea with all the love I could possibly have, and I really do not give one single shit if, and when the bad boy trend is over.” I said, restraining myself. I know she didn’t mean to be rude, but she has a really bad way of hiding it.

“I think what V is trying to say is that she doesn’t want to see you get hurt. I’ve known Jug and his dad, and I’ve seen the inconsistencies and violence they go through” Betty added.

“Not to mention word is getting around that a Serpent and Midge were… y’know” Veronica suggested, raising her eyebrows.

Is she…?

I waved my hands in front of my face, trying to dispel their accusations. “Are you accusing my boyfriend of one, cheating on me,” I numbered on my fingers “and two, murdering Midge?” I whisper yelled, obviously offended. They just looked at eachother, not wanting to confirm their suspicions.

I just gave them a disappointed and heart broken look before walking into the classroom behind me. Their accusations stung, knowing that they could believe Sweet Pea would actually cheat on his girlfriend, and then murder his side chick. Sure he looked rough, and maybe grew up on the wrong tracks but he would never, ever do something as petty and juvenile as cheating, let alone murder.

The room was filled with serpents as they crowded around the desks. Jughead was at the front of the classroom talking about ghoulies coming back and having it out for the Serpents. It wasn’t hard to find Sweet Pea. He was leaning against one of the desks, arms crossed. I made my way over to him turning around to settle in between his legs, his arms wrapping around my waist. Jug kept talking about how the Serpents needed to be careful and prepare themselves for the ghoulies, until the door burst open, revealing a pack of Bulldogs. Pea immediately stiffened up, lightly shoving me behind him.

“Which one of you reptiles was doing Midge Klump?” Reggie demanded. The feud between him and Pea was an ongoing on battle, both refusing to surrender. “I’m guessing it was you, Sweet Pea.” He moved closer to the rogue Bulldog, pulling Jughead out of the way. My ears perked up, keeping a close eye on my boyfriend. Word sure got around fast. Archie was trying to get Reggie to back down, but to no use. If I know one thing, it’s to never get in between two boys fighting. Especially with one who actually knows how to fight.

“You ass. I didn’t even know Midge” He kept inching forwarded, trying to intimidate Reggie. “But yeah, I get why she wouldn’t want fleas from you mangy Bulldogs.” Two things Pea hated was being accused of infidelity, and a crime he didn’t commit based on his background.

And Reggie just did both.

Reggie was the first to make a move, initiating the fight. But as quick as it began, it was over. Both being pulled apart from each other once again. The Bulldogs dragged Reggie out of the room, leaving Archie behind. Veronica and Betty had joined making sure their boyfriends were okay once they gained word that a fight started. Pea shrugged Jughead off of him as he made his way back to where I stood, waiting for him. Archie and Jughead argued about Archies friends actions. Jughead offended that they infiltrated the one safe space they had on campus, and immediately claiming one of his own killed Midge. Archie wasn’t defending Reggies motive, but he wasn’t fighting it either.

“You’re just going to let them talk to us like that? To me? Accuse me of killing some girl I never even knew existed until a couple days ago?” Pea questioned. I started rubbing small circles on his back while his voice rose an octave. “You know damn well I would never even think about another girl like that! To do that to y/n?” He looked down at me, hurt.

I got a couple concerned looks from Archie, Veronica, and Betty while he went off. They were worried he was going to blow his top.

“Just let him get it out” I said softly, continuing to rub his back. It was easier and safer for him to get his anger and frustration out this way. Toni and fangs flashed some supportive smiles our way, watching Sweet Pea cool down. Eventually he sat down next to me in a huff, finally over his rant. He slung an arm around my shoulder and placed a chaste kiss to my head. I rested my head on his shoulder, still silently comforting him. This was our routine whenever one of us would get riled up. It was our thing, and it’s what makes us so perfect for each other.

“Hey, y/n!” I heard someone calling my name as I exited the school doors. I turned around to see Veronica rushing towards me. “I just wanted to apologize for what I said earlier. I saw the way Sweet Pea reacted to what Reggie had to say, and how you two work so well together” She said genuinely. “I know I overstepped by accusing your boyfriend of y’know…” I let out a small chuckle.

“It’s fine V, I forgive you.” I laughed again.

“Oh thank God, I didn’t want to be responsible for breaking up Riverdale’s newest -second- most cutest couple” She joked. “Speaking of which,” She had a devilish look on her face “Double date tonight?” She asked with a hopeful smile.

I giggled a little, looking at my tree of a boyfriend goofing off with his friends in the parking lot.

“We’ll see”

[endlessarchite]

How We Planned The Beach House Kitchen

The beach house kitchen will be our seventh kitchen project (!!!) after redoing three of our own (this one’s our favorite), a showhouse that we did in 2014, a spec house for a local builder in 2016 (seen below – we loved that blue tile), and a local teachers’ lounge that we redid last year.

And while that sounds like a lot of kitchens to have under our belts, the process can still feel pretty daunting – probably just due to the sheer number of decisions that a kitchen reno brings. “What’s the most functional layout? Is that too many drawers or not enough? Will I live to regret the lighting? Is it all going to come in within budget?” So many questions. And decisions. And changing of minds.

But as much work as it is to plan, stress, overthink, and replan a kitchen – it can easily be one of the biggest improvements you can make to a house. And now that we’re so close to FINALLY installing the beach house kitchen (hello light at the end of the tunnel!), we thought we’d take you through the steps (and kitchen planning tools) that we used to make our plan.

That photo above is what the space looked like as of last week. The lights are hung, trim is getting painted, and the floor holes are all patched with matching reclaimed pine. Once they’re sanded and sealed we can begin the kitchen install! It’s feeling very real all of a sudden. And it’s a far cry from what it looked like when we first started planning the space last year:

I won’t rehash all of the floor planning we did (it’s in this post) but you can see where we ended up below. Well, mostly ended up (the master bath got rearranged one more time to accommodate a shower). But the important part is the kitchen, which you can see in the upper left of these schematics:

We made those initial floor plans in Photoshop (like I’m sure all the professional architects do…. right?) so it wasn’t precisely to scale and not even close to something we could rely on to order cabinets. So having made the decision to order our cabinetry from Ikea, we turned to their free 3D kitchen planning software.

It’s not my favorite interface in the world (you can read all my pros & cons in this post) but if you’re using Ikea products, it’s a great way to plan the precise items you’ll need. We also used it when ordering our laundry room cabinets and our bonus room built-ins (shown below), both of which we’ve been very happy with – so Ikea was a no-brainer for keeping the beach house kitchen looking good, without costing a fortune.

We went through a few different ideas and layouts within the software – like do we do upper cabinets or skip them? We eventually landed on no uppers, just because we’re suckers for open shelves and the cabinets were looking pretty heavy in the rendering, even in white (we want the room to feel balanced, not left-heavy with too much stuff on that wall as you walk into the room). And since this is going to be a weekly vacation rental, nobody is going to be living here for months on end, so we realized we’d have plenty of storage space for vacation goers – especially with the extra cabinets that we added to flank the back door.

One challenge with the Ikea software is that you can’t pull in products that aren’t theirs – so I couldn’t render our 40″ pink stove or the exact dimensions of the fridge we’ve had our eye on. And I can never get their shelves to look the way I want (this is reminding me that I really need to relearn Google SketchUp). So the renderings are a little imperfect, but this one is probably the closest to what it’ll be like (just add sconces, pendants, and shelves in your mind).

Before ordering, we also loosely mapped things out in real life to make sure we liked the clearance of everything. You can see our fancy stand-ins for the island. Not the big saw, just the wood scraps on the floor. Told you they were fancy.

It’s also pretty hard to get a sense of the finishes in these renderings, so we ended up making some mood boards to be sure we liked the road we were headed down. Here’s the final one, but I’ll show you how we got to this mix in a second:

1. Stove / 2. Faucet / 3. Hood / 4. Sconces / 5. Island Pendants / 6. Counter (inspo pic) / 7. Cabinet doors / 8. Fridge (inspo pic)

From the get-go, Sherry and I both agreed we wanted this kitchen to feel casual and unfussy. The beach is supposed to be relaxing, so we wanted the kitchen to feel the same way. One of our first big inspiration pictures is shown above as #7, because it just looks very chill. Still plenty nice, but not too formal or uptight (which is generally right where we’re aiming with this beach house). Sorry, I can’t find a source better than this one.

The flat-fronted cabinets really stood out to us in that picture because we’ve never been drawn to them before. They always struck us as crazy modern or too commercial (like a school cafeteria from the 90’s). But after hunting down more inspiration photos on Pinterest, we were officially flat-front converts for the beach house.

(sources: left image, right image)

You’ll also notice that 4 out of these 5 photos don’t show upper cabinets, which further confirmed our lean towards a more unfussy/casual look with lots of open space for the eye to move around.

(sources: left image, right image)

We haven’t chosen hardware yet because we’re waiting to see how everything looks once we have it installed – but the idea of leather pulls is pretty cool (and clearly they’re very popular with flat-front drawers). We’re considering a few other options, and we also might try to hunt down some wood knobs to play off of some of the old wood doorknobs in the house. We’re hoping the right choice will be much clearer once we can actually hold up some samples in the finished space, but here are a few of the ones we’re considering: 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 7 / 8 / 9

Another big source of inspiration for us is Orlando’s kitchen. He revealed it on Emily Henderson’s blog right around the time we were ordering ours, so it helped us lock in our decision to do butcher block counters (we actually switched our plan last minute to get the exact ones that he chose – these from Ikea). We even ordered extra butcher block so we can make our floating shelves from the same stuff.

(source)

People have mixed feeling about butcher block in a rental, but we like that it’s affordable (like 10 times more affordable than some other options) and we LOVE that we can sand and refinish any major beatings that it might take (can’t say that if someone cracks/scratches/stains an expensive stone slab). We’ve actually heard a ton of helpful info from those of you with butcher block counters about how to seal them / treat them so they look good and last, so we’ll definitely be sharing all of that once they’re in (and we’ll be honest about how they hold up too – so stay tuned for photos and stuff as they get used and abused).

Orlando’s kitchen was also reassuring because he used the exact fridge we were considering. We don’t have space for a large fridge and we worried this one might look cheap, but – phew! – it looks great.

All of these decisions were made back in April, and we happened to lock everything in right as Ikea was having their semi-annual Kitchen Event Sale (more on that in podcast episode #52). The total (for cabinets and counters) would’ve been about $3200 – but we got 20% off our entire order thanks to the sale. Which saved us about $600 and brought the total closer to $2,600. That even includes the sink, soft close drawers/doors, and a pull-out trash can!

But even with most of the big items ordered, we still had lighting to figure out. Our first challenge was actual brightness, because I, John Petersik, am a lighting over-thinker to the Nth degree. First, we nixed the idea of adding recessed can lighting because we worried it would feel too “new” for the look we wanted in this 100 year old house. We have a few recessed lights elsewhere, so we’re not totally against them for the house, but the kitchen/dining room ceiling is SUCH a large plane, we wanted to avoid having a bunch of glowing circles dotting those pretty extra-high ceilings.

In the past we’ve relied on recessed lights to provide most of the functional lighting in our own kitchens, with pendants providing task and accent lighting. But in the beach house, our kitchen lighting – two island pendants and three sconces (along with two lights over the dining table nearby) – would need to do it all. So we quickly realized we needed to nix anything with a solid shade, so that every bulb could cast light in all directions instead of just shining it down. For instance, anything like the ones in our house’s kitchen were immediately out of the running. Sorry, guys.

Even with that no-shades rule helping us narrow things down, we still had a ton of lights that we were considering. So I mocked up this graphic to get a better sense of how our options looked with the rest of the kitchen. This was a failed option we were just playing around with at first (note the solid shades on both the sconces and pendants) but it was a huge help to see things this way. The subway backsplash isn’t for sure either, just a nice simple choice that lets us focus on what lights could work best:

We considered a few multi-light pendants, but most of them got eliminated for being the wrong style (these felt too modern) or so large that they dwarfed the island (or broke the bank).

A lot of the lights we typically would choose in a heartbeat (like these guys from Ballard Designs) felt too traditional for the vibe we were going for once we saw them in the mockup. Much of that had to do with the pink stove I think. It’s really cool and old and fun, but it might not lend itself to anything too formal.

The other thing we started bumping up against was scale. For instance, we started to think these beauties were the answer to all of our problems: glass shades, vintage look, right finish…

…but I was alarmed by 6″ measurement in its description (and that was the LARGER option they offered). My rendering above wasn’t to scale, so I started making a new version that was a bit more representative of size – particularly of the light in proportion to the eight foot island. That shed A LOT of light on the situation (pun completely intended). These were definitely too small.

I’ll cut to the chase. We ended up with this, as you saw in the original mood board up top. The pendants are 15″ wide and the clear shades allow them to throw light in every direction. Oh how I wish they were still on the Internet to link to them for you (they’re even prettier in person than in photos) but they seem to be out of stock everywhere. They were Trent Austin from Wayfair, so cross your fingers they come back someday.

We love how large the glass shades are without feeling heavy. The room instantly feels a lot closer to “done” with them hung, like they’re just begging for an island to be there. And the rest of the cabinets. And the appliances.

The sconces have shades that are wire mesh, so the light passes through them just like we wanted. We actually saw them in a showhouse shortly after ordering them and they looked GREAT all lit up. You can see how they’re not solid a bit better in this shot (there’s one more across the room too, which you can see in the second picture in this post).

Okay and one last mock-up. We also did this one that included plans for the adjacent dining area, just to try to picture how that would work with everything going on in the kitchen. Of course it has a pair of capiz pendants, because it wouldn’t be a beach house without Sherry’s favorite material of all time.

We opted for two lights over the dining table so that from the couch in the living room, the kitchen lights wouldn’t intersect at an odd place (once centered fixture would have). We also thought it would be fun to try two smaller pendants instead of one large chandelier. They don’t look great in the shot above because they’re hung higher than they’ll eventually go (and there’s no table under them to ground them). Oh yeah and the capiz is all still wrapped in its plastic shipping. Mummified capiz is the new black.

So that’s where we are. We’re headed out there soon to finish restoring the tub upstairs and to see how a few last floor repairs went upstairs. There are just a few tiny things on the to-do list (like finishing a railing for the back stairs) and then floor sanding and sealing can begin! After that, we can finally get started on making this kitchen come to life… and finally get those Ikea boxes out of our garage, which I’m also pretty stoked about.

Psst- You can read all about our past progress at the beach house by clicking into Our Beach House category. 

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[statusreview]

How We Planned The Beach House Kitchen

The beach house kitchen will be our seventh kitchen project (!!!) after redoing three of our own (this one’s our favorite), a showhouse that we did in 2014, a spec house for a local builder in 2016 (seen below – we loved that blue tile), and a local teachers’ lounge that we redid last year.

And while that sounds like a lot of kitchens to have under our belts, the process can still feel pretty daunting – probably just due to the sheer number of decisions that a kitchen reno brings. “What’s the most functional layout? Is that too many drawers or not enough? Will I live to regret the lighting? Is it all going to come in within budget?” So many questions. And decisions. And changing of minds.

But as much work as it is to plan, stress, overthink, and replan a kitchen – it can easily be one of the biggest improvements you can make to a house. And now that we’re so close to FINALLY installing the beach house kitchen (hello light at the end of the tunnel!), we thought we’d take you through the steps (and kitchen planning tools) that we used to make our plan.

That photo above is what the space looked like as of last week. The lights are hung, trim is getting painted, and the floor holes are all patched with matching reclaimed pine. Once they’re sanded and sealed we can begin the kitchen install! It’s feeling very real all of a sudden. And it’s a far cry from what it looked like when we first started planning the space last year:

I won’t rehash all of the floor planning we did (it’s in this post) but you can see where we ended up below. Well, mostly ended up (the master bath got rearranged one more time to accommodate a shower). But the important part is the kitchen, which you can see in the upper left of these schematics:

We made those initial floor plans in Photoshop (like I’m sure all the professional architects do…. right?) so it wasn’t precisely to scale and not even close to something we could rely on to order cabinets. So having made the decision to order our cabinetry from Ikea, we turned to their free 3D kitchen planning software.

It’s not my favorite interface in the world (you can read all my pros & cons in this post) but if you’re using Ikea products, it’s a great way to plan the precise items you’ll need. We also used it when ordering our laundry room cabinets and our bonus room built-ins (shown below), both of which we’ve been very happy with – so Ikea was a no-brainer for keeping the beach house kitchen looking good, without costing a fortune.

We went through a few different ideas and layouts within the software – like do we do upper cabinets or skip them? We eventually landed on no uppers, just because we’re suckers for open shelves and the cabinets were looking pretty heavy in the rendering, even in white (we want the room to feel balanced, not left-heavy with too much stuff on that wall as you walk into the room). And since this is going to be a weekly vacation rental, nobody is going to be living here for months on end, so we realized we’d have plenty of storage space for vacation goers – especially with the extra cabinets that we added to flank the back door.

One challenge with the Ikea software is that you can’t pull in products that aren’t theirs – so I couldn’t render our 40″ pink stove or the exact dimensions of the fridge we’ve had our eye on. And I can never get their shelves to look the way I want (this is reminding me that I really need to relearn Google SketchUp). So the renderings are a little imperfect, but this one is probably the closest to what it’ll be like (just add sconces, pendants, and shelves in your mind).

Before ordering, we also loosely mapped things out in real life to make sure we liked the clearance of everything. You can see our fancy stand-ins for the island. Not the big saw, just the wood scraps on the floor. Told you they were fancy.

It’s also pretty hard to get a sense of the finishes in these renderings, so we ended up making some mood boards to be sure we liked the road we were headed down. Here’s the final one, but I’ll show you how we got to this mix in a second:

1. Stove / 2. Faucet / 3. Hood / 4. Sconces / 5. Island Pendants / 6. Counter (inspo pic) / 7. Cabinet doors / 8. Fridge (inspo pic)

From the get-go, Sherry and I both agreed we wanted this kitchen to feel casual and unfussy. The beach is supposed to be relaxing, so we wanted the kitchen to feel the same way. One of our first big inspiration pictures is shown above as #7, because it just looks very chill. Still plenty nice, but not too formal or uptight (which is generally right where we’re aiming with this beach house). Sorry, I can’t find a source better than this one.

The flat-fronted cabinets really stood out to us in that picture because we’ve never been drawn to them before. They always struck us as crazy modern or too commercial (like a school cafeteria from the 90’s). But after hunting down more inspiration photos on Pinterest, we were officially flat-front converts for the beach house.

(sources: left image, right image)

You’ll also notice that 4 out of these 5 photos don’t show upper cabinets, which further confirmed our lean towards a more unfussy/casual look with lots of open space for the eye to move around.

(sources: left image, right image)

We haven’t chosen hardware yet because we’re waiting to see how everything looks once we have it installed – but the idea of leather pulls is pretty cool (and clearly they’re very popular with flat-front drawers). We’re considering a few other options, and we also might try to hunt down some wood knobs to play off of some of the old wood doorknobs in the house. We’re hoping the right choice will be much clearer once we can actually hold up some samples in the finished space, but here are a few of the ones we’re considering: 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 7 / 8 / 9

Another big source of inspiration for us is Orlando’s kitchen. He revealed it on Emily Henderson’s blog right around the time we were ordering ours, so it helped us lock in our decision to do butcher block counters (we actually switched our plan last minute to get the exact ones that he chose – these from Ikea). We even ordered extra butcher block so we can make our floating shelves from the same stuff.

(source)

People have mixed feeling about butcher block in a rental, but we like that it’s affordable (like 10 times more affordable than some other options) and we LOVE that we can sand and refinish any major beatings that it might take (can’t say that if someone cracks/scratches/stains an expensive stone slab). We’ve actually heard a ton of helpful info from those of you with butcher block counters about how to seal them / treat them so they look good and last, so we’ll definitely be sharing all of that once they’re in (and we’ll be honest about how they hold up too – so stay tuned for photos and stuff as they get used and abused).

Orlando’s kitchen was also reassuring because he used the exact fridge we were considering. We don’t have space for a large fridge and we worried this one might look cheap, but – phew! – it looks great.

All of these decisions were made back in April, and we happened to lock everything in right as Ikea was having their semi-annual Kitchen Event Sale (more on that in podcast episode #52). The total (for cabinets and counters) would’ve been about $3200 – but we got 20% off our entire order thanks to the sale. Which saved us about $600 and brought the total closer to $2,600. That even includes the sink, soft close drawers/doors, and a pull-out trash can!

But even with most of the big items ordered, we still had lighting to figure out. Our first challenge was actual brightness, because I, John Petersik, am a lighting over-thinker to the Nth degree. First, we nixed the idea of adding recessed can lighting because we worried it would feel too “new” for the look we wanted in this 100 year old house. We have a few recessed lights elsewhere, so we’re not totally against them for the house, but the kitchen/dining room ceiling is SUCH a large plane, we wanted to avoid having a bunch of glowing circles dotting those pretty extra-high ceilings.

In the past we’ve relied on recessed lights to provide most of the functional lighting in our own kitchens, with pendants providing task and accent lighting. But in the beach house, our kitchen lighting – two island pendants and three sconces (along with two lights over the dining table nearby) – would need to do it all. So we quickly realized we needed to nix anything with a solid shade, so that every bulb could cast light in all directions instead of just shining it down. For instance, anything like the ones in our house’s kitchen were immediately out of the running. Sorry, guys.

Even with that no-shades rule helping us narrow things down, we still had a ton of lights that we were considering. So I mocked up this graphic to get a better sense of how our options looked with the rest of the kitchen. This was a failed option we were just playing around with at first (note the solid shades on both the sconces and pendants) but it was a huge help to see things this way. The subway backsplash isn’t for sure either, just a nice simple choice that lets us focus on what lights could work best:

We considered a few multi-light pendants, but most of them got eliminated for being the wrong style (these felt too modern) or so large that they dwarfed the island (or broke the bank).

A lot of the lights we typically would choose in a heartbeat (like these guys from Ballard Designs) felt too traditional for the vibe we were going for once we saw them in the mockup. Much of that had to do with the pink stove I think. It’s really cool and old and fun, but it might not lend itself to anything too formal.

The other thing we started bumping up against was scale. For instance, we started to think these beauties were the answer to all of our problems: glass shades, vintage look, right finish…

…but I was alarmed by 6″ measurement in its description (and that was the LARGER option they offered). My rendering above wasn’t to scale, so I started making a new version that was a bit more representative of size – particularly of the light in proportion to the eight foot island. That shed A LOT of light on the situation (pun completely intended). These were definitely too small.

I’ll cut to the chase. We ended up with this, as you saw in the original mood board up top. The pendants are 15″ wide and the clear shades allow them to throw light in every direction. Oh how I wish they were still on the Internet to link to them for you (they’re even prettier in person than in photos) but they seem to be out of stock everywhere. They were Trent Austin from Wayfair, so cross your fingers they come back someday.

We love how large the glass shades are without feeling heavy. The room instantly feels a lot closer to “done” with them hung, like they’re just begging for an island to be there. And the rest of the cabinets. And the appliances.

The sconces have shades that are wire mesh, so the light passes through them just like we wanted. We actually saw them in a showhouse shortly after ordering them and they looked GREAT all lit up. You can see how they’re not solid a bit better in this shot (there’s one more across the room too, which you can see in the second picture in this post).

Okay and one last mock-up. We also did this one that included plans for the adjacent dining area, just to try to picture how that would work with everything going on in the kitchen. Of course it has a pair of capiz pendants, because it wouldn’t be a beach house without Sherry’s favorite material of all time.

We opted for two lights over the dining table so that from the couch in the living room, the kitchen lights wouldn’t intersect at an odd place (once centered fixture would have). We also thought it would be fun to try two smaller pendants instead of one large chandelier. They don’t look great in the shot above because they’re hung higher than they’ll eventually go (and there’s no table under them to ground them). Oh yeah and the capiz is all still wrapped in its plastic shipping. Mummified capiz is the new black.

So that’s where we are. We’re headed out there soon to finish restoring the tub upstairs and to see how a few last floor repairs went upstairs. There are just a few tiny things on the to-do list (like finishing a railing for the back stairs) and then floor sanding and sealing can begin! After that, we can finally get started on making this kitchen come to life… and finally get those Ikea boxes out of our garage, which I’m also pretty stoked about.

Psst- You can read all about our past progress at the beach house by clicking into Our Beach House category. 

*This post contains affiliate links

The post How We Planned The Beach House Kitchen appeared first on Young House Love.

How We Planned The Beach House Kitchen published first on http://ift.tt/2r6hzQy

[truereviewpage]

How We Planned The Beach House Kitchen

The beach house kitchen will be our seventh kitchen project (!!!) after redoing three of our own (this one’s our favorite), a showhouse that we did in 2014, a spec house for a local builder in 2016 (seen below – we loved that blue tile), and a local teachers’ lounge that we redid last year.

And while that sounds like a lot of kitchens to have under our belts, the process can still feel pretty daunting – probably just due to the sheer number of decisions that a kitchen reno brings. “What’s the most functional layout? Is that too many drawers or not enough? Will I live to regret the lighting? Is it all going to come in within budget?” So many questions. And decisions. And changing of minds.

But as much work as it is to plan, stress, overthink, and replan a kitchen – it can easily be one of the biggest improvements you can make to a house. And now that we’re so close to FINALLY installing the beach house kitchen (hello light at the end of the tunnel!), we thought we’d take you through the steps (and kitchen planning tools) that we used to make our plan.

That photo above is what the space looked like as of last week. The lights are hung, trim is getting painted, and the floor holes are all patched with matching reclaimed pine. Once they’re sanded and sealed we can begin the kitchen install! It’s feeling very real all of a sudden. And it’s a far cry from what it looked like when we first started planning the space last year:

I won’t rehash all of the floor planning we did (it’s in this post) but you can see where we ended up below. Well, mostly ended up (the master bath got rearranged one more time to accommodate a shower). But the important part is the kitchen, which you can see in the upper left of these schematics:

We made those initial floor plans in Photoshop (like I’m sure all the professional architects do…. right?) so it wasn’t precisely to scale and not even close to something we could rely on to order cabinets. So having made the decision to order our cabinetry from Ikea, we turned to their free 3D kitchen planning software.

It’s not my favorite interface in the world (you can read all my pros & cons in this post) but if you’re using Ikea products, it’s a great way to plan the precise items you’ll need. We also used it when ordering our laundry room cabinets and our bonus room built-ins (shown below), both of which we’ve been very happy with – so Ikea was a no-brainer for keeping the beach house kitchen looking good, without costing a fortune.

We went through a few different ideas and layouts within the software – like do we do upper cabinets or skip them? We eventually landed on no uppers, just because we’re suckers for open shelves and the cabinets were looking pretty heavy in the rendering, even in white (we want the room to feel balanced, not left-heavy with too much stuff on that wall as you walk into the room). And since this is going to be a weekly vacation rental, nobody is going to be living here for months on end, so we realized we’d have plenty of storage space for vacation goers – especially with the extra cabinets that we added to flank the back door.

One challenge with the Ikea software is that you can’t pull in products that aren’t theirs – so I couldn’t render our 40″ pink stove or the exact dimensions of the fridge we’ve had our eye on. And I can never get their shelves to look the way I want (this is reminding me that I really need to relearn Google SketchUp). So the renderings are a little imperfect, but this one is probably the closest to what it’ll be like (just add sconces, pendants, and shelves in your mind).

Before ordering, we also loosely mapped things out in real life to make sure we liked the clearance of everything. You can see our fancy stand-ins for the island. Not the big saw, just the wood scraps on the floor. Told you they were fancy.

It’s also pretty hard to get a sense of the finishes in these renderings, so we ended up making some mood boards to be sure we liked the road we were headed down. Here’s the final one, but I’ll show you how we got to this mix in a second:

1. Stove / 2. Faucet / 3. Hood / 4. Sconces / 5. Island Pendants / 6. Counter (inspo pic) / 7. Cabinet doors / 8. Fridge (inspo pic)

From the get-go, Sherry and I both agreed we wanted this kitchen to feel casual and unfussy. The beach is supposed to be relaxing, so we wanted the kitchen to feel the same way. One of our first big inspiration pictures is shown above as #7, because it just looks very chill. Still plenty nice, but not too formal or uptight (which is generally right where we’re aiming with this beach house). Sorry, I can’t find a source better than this one.

The flat-fronted cabinets really stood out to us in that picture because we’ve never been drawn to them before. They always struck us as crazy modern or too commercial (like a school cafeteria from the 90’s). But after hunting down more inspiration photos on Pinterest, we were officially flat-front converts for the beach house.

(sources: left image, right image)

You’ll also notice that 4 out of these 5 photos don’t show upper cabinets, which further confirmed our lean towards a more unfussy/casual look with lots of open space for the eye to move around.

(sources: left image, right image)

We haven’t chosen hardware yet because we’re waiting to see how everything looks once we have it installed – but the idea of leather pulls is pretty cool (and clearly they’re very popular with flat-front drawers). We’re considering a few other options, and we also might try to hunt down some wood knobs to play off of some of the old wood doorknobs in the house. We’re hoping the right choice will be much clearer once we can actually hold up some samples in the finished space, but here are a few of the ones we’re considering: 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 7 / 8 / 9

Another big source of inspiration for us is Orlando’s kitchen. He revealed it on Emily Henderson’s blog right around the time we were ordering ours, so it helped us lock in our decision to do butcher block counters (we actually switched our plan last minute to get the exact ones that he chose – these from Ikea). We even ordered extra butcher block so we can make our floating shelves from the same stuff.

(source)

People have mixed feeling about butcher block in a rental, but we like that it’s affordable (like 10 times more affordable than some other options) and we LOVE that we can sand and refinish any major beatings that it might take (can’t say that if someone cracks/scratches/stains an expensive stone slab). We’ve actually heard a ton of helpful info from those of you with butcher block counters about how to seal them / treat them so they look good and last, so we’ll definitely be sharing all of that once they’re in (and we’ll be honest about how they hold up too – so stay tuned for photos and stuff as they get used and abused).

Orlando’s kitchen was also reassuring because he used the exact fridge we were considering. We don’t have space for a large fridge and we worried this one might look cheap, but – phew! – it looks great.

All of these decisions were made back in April, and we happened to lock everything in right as Ikea was having their semi-annual Kitchen Event Sale (more on that in podcast episode #52). The total (for cabinets and counters) would’ve been about $3200 – but we got 20% off our entire order thanks to the sale. Which saved us about $600 and brought the total closer to $2,600. That even includes the sink, soft close drawers/doors, and a pull-out trash can!

But even with most of the big items ordered, we still had lighting to figure out. Our first challenge was actual brightness, because I, John Petersik, am a lighting over-thinker to the Nth degree. First, we nixed the idea of adding recessed can lighting because we worried it would feel too “new” for the look we wanted in this 100 year old house. We have a few recessed lights elsewhere, so we’re not totally against them for the house, but the kitchen/dining room ceiling is SUCH a large plane, we wanted to avoid having a bunch of glowing circles dotting those pretty extra-high ceilings.

In the past we’ve relied on recessed lights to provide most of the functional lighting in our own kitchens, with pendants providing task and accent lighting. But in the beach house, our kitchen lighting – two island pendants and three sconces (along with two lights over the dining table nearby) – would need to do it all. So we quickly realized we needed to nix anything with a solid shade, so that every bulb could cast light in all directions instead of just shining it down. For instance, anything like the ones in our house’s kitchen were immediately out of the running. Sorry, guys.

Even with that no-shades rule helping us narrow things down, we still had a ton of lights that we were considering. So I mocked up this graphic to get a better sense of how our options looked with the rest of the kitchen. This was a failed option we were just playing around with at first (note the solid shades on both the sconces and pendants) but it was a huge help to see things this way. The subway backsplash isn’t for sure either, just a nice simple choice that lets us focus on what lights could work best:

We considered a few multi-light pendants, but most of them got eliminated for being the wrong style (these felt too modern) or so large that they dwarfed the island (or broke the bank).

A lot of the lights we typically would choose in a heartbeat (like these guys from Ballard Designs) felt too traditional for the vibe we were going for once we saw them in the mockup. Much of that had to do with the pink stove I think. It’s really cool and old and fun, but it might not lend itself to anything too formal.

The other thing we started bumping up against was scale. For instance, we started to think these beauties were the answer to all of our problems: glass shades, vintage look, right finish…

…but I was alarmed by 6″ measurement in its description (and that was the LARGER option they offered). My rendering above wasn’t to scale, so I started making a new version that was a bit more representative of size – particularly of the light in proportion to the eight foot island. That shed A LOT of light on the situation (pun completely intended). These were definitely too small.

I’ll cut to the chase. We ended up with this, as you saw in the original mood board up top. The pendants are 15″ wide and the clear shades allow them to throw light in every direction. Oh how I wish they were still on the Internet to link to them for you (they’re even prettier in person than in photos) but they seem to be out of stock everywhere. They were Trent Austin from Wayfair, so cross your fingers they come back someday.

We love how large the glass shades are without feeling heavy. The room instantly feels a lot closer to “done” with them hung, like they’re just begging for an island to be there. And the rest of the cabinets. And the appliances.

The sconces have shades that are wire mesh, so the light passes through them just like we wanted. We actually saw them in a showhouse shortly after ordering them and they looked GREAT all lit up. You can see how they’re not solid a bit better in this shot (there’s one more across the room too, which you can see in the second picture in this post).

Okay and one last mock-up. We also did this one that included plans for the adjacent dining area, just to try to picture how that would work with everything going on in the kitchen. Of course it has a pair of capiz pendants, because it wouldn’t be a beach house without Sherry’s favorite material of all time.

We opted for two lights over the dining table so that from the couch in the living room, the kitchen lights wouldn’t intersect at an odd place (once centered fixture would have). We also thought it would be fun to try two smaller pendants instead of one large chandelier. They don’t look great in the shot above because they’re hung higher than they’ll eventually go (and there’s no table under them to ground them). Oh yeah and the capiz is all still wrapped in its plastic shipping. Mummified capiz is the new black.

So that’s where we are. We’re headed out there soon to finish restoring the tub upstairs and to see how a few last floor repairs went upstairs. There are just a few tiny things on the to-do list (like finishing a railing for the back stairs) and then floor sanding and sealing can begin! After that, we can finally get started on making this kitchen come to life… and finally get those Ikea boxes out of our garage, which I’m also pretty stoked about.

Psst- You can read all about our past progress at the beach house by clicking into Our Beach House category. 

*This post contains affiliate links

The post How We Planned The Beach House Kitchen appeared first on Young House Love.

How We Planned The Beach House Kitchen published first on http://ift.tt/2qCHnUt

[additionallysad]

How We Planned The Beach House Kitchen http://ift.tt/2fxRI48

The beach house kitchen will be our seventh kitchen project (!!!) after redoing three of our own (this one’s our favorite), a showhouse that we did in 2014, a spec house for a local builder in 2016 (seen below – we loved that blue tile), and a local teachers’ lounge that we redid last year.

And while that sounds like a lot of kitchens to have under our belts, the process can still feel pretty daunting – probably just due to the sheer number of decisions that a kitchen reno brings. “What’s the most functional layout? Is that too many drawers or not enough? Will I live to regret the lighting? Is it all going to come in within budget?” So many questions. And decisions. And changing of minds.

But as much work as it is to plan, stress, overthink, and replan a kitchen – it can easily be one of the biggest improvements you can make to a house. And now that we’re so close to FINALLY installing the beach house kitchen (hello light at the end of the tunnel!), we thought we’d take you through the steps (and kitchen planning tools) that we used to make our plan.

That photo above is what the space looked like as of last week. The lights are hung, trim is getting painted, and the floor holes are all patched with matching reclaimed pine. Once they’re sanded and sealed we can begin the kitchen install! It’s feeling very real all of a sudden. And it’s a far cry from what it looked like when we first started planning the space last year:

I won’t rehash all of the floor planning we did (it’s in this post) but you can see where we ended up below. Well, mostly ended up (the master bath got rearranged one more time to accommodate a shower). But the important part is the kitchen, which you can see in the upper left of these schematics:

We made those initial floor plans in Photoshop (like I’m sure all the professional architects do…. right?) so it wasn’t precisely to scale and not even close to something we could rely on to order cabinets. So having made the decision to order our cabinetry from Ikea, we turned to their free 3D kitchen planning software.

It’s not my favorite interface in the world (you can read all my pros & cons in this post) but if you’re using Ikea products, it’s a great way to plan the precise items you’ll need. We also used it when ordering our laundry room cabinets and our bonus room built-ins (shown below), both of which we’ve been very happy with – so Ikea was a no-brainer for keeping the beach house kitchen looking good, without costing a fortune.

We went through a few different ideas and layouts within the software – like do we do upper cabinets or skip them? We eventually landed on no uppers, just because we’re suckers for open shelves and the cabinets were looking pretty heavy in the rendering, even in white (we want the room to feel balanced, not left-heavy with too much stuff on that wall as you walk into the room). And since this is going to be a weekly vacation rental, nobody is going to be living here for months on end, so we realized we’d have plenty of storage space for vacation goers – especially with the extra cabinets that we added to flank the back door.

One challenge with the Ikea software is that you can’t pull in products that aren’t theirs – so I couldn’t render our 40″ pink stove or the exact dimensions of the fridge we’ve had our eye on. And I can never get their shelves to look the way I want (this is reminding me that I really need to relearn Google SketchUp). So the renderings are a little imperfect, but this one is probably the closest to what it’ll be like (just add sconces, pendants, and shelves in your mind).

Before ordering, we also loosely mapped things out in real life to make sure we liked the clearance of everything. You can see our fancy stand-ins for the island. Not the big saw, just the wood scraps on the floor. Told you they were fancy.

It’s also pretty hard to get a sense of the finishes in these renderings, so we ended up making some mood boards to be sure we liked the road we were headed down. Here’s the final one, but I’ll show you how we got to this mix in a second:

1. Stove / 2. Faucet / 3. Hood / 4. Sconces / 5. Island Pendants / 6. Counter (inspo pic) / 7. Cabinet doors / 8. Fridge (inspo pic)

From the get-go, Sherry and I both agreed we wanted this kitchen to feel casual and unfussy. The beach is supposed to be relaxing, so we wanted the kitchen to feel the same way. One of our first big inspiration pictures is shown above as #7, because it just looks very chill. Still plenty nice, but not too formal or uptight (which is generally right where we’re aiming with this beach house). Sorry, I can’t find a source better than this one.

The flat-fronted cabinets really stood out to us in that picture because we’ve never been drawn to them before. They always struck us as crazy modern or too commercial (like a school cafeteria from the 90’s). But after hunting down more inspiration photos on Pinterest, we were officially flat-front converts for the beach house.

(sources: left image, right image)

You’ll also notice that 4 out of these 5 photos don’t show upper cabinets, which further confirmed our lean towards a more unfussy/casual look with lots of open space for the eye to move around.

(sources: left image, right image)

We haven’t chosen hardware yet because we’re waiting to see how everything looks once we have it installed – but the idea of leather pulls is pretty cool (and clearly they’re very popular with flat-front drawers). We’re considering a few other options, and we also might try to hunt down some wood knobs to play off of some of the old wood doorknobs in the house. We’re hoping the right choice will be much clearer once we can actually hold up some samples in the finished space, but here are a few of the ones we’re considering: 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 7 / 8 / 9

Another big source of inspiration for us is Orlando’s kitchen. He revealed it on Emily Henderson’s blog right around the time we were ordering ours, so it helped us lock in our decision to do butcher block counters (we actually switched our plan last minute to get the exact ones that he chose – these from Ikea). We even ordered extra butcher block so we can make our floating shelves from the same stuff.

(source)

People have mixed feeling about butcher block in a rental, but we like that it’s affordable (like 10 times more affordable than some other options) and we LOVE that we can sand and refinish any major beatings that it might take (can’t say that if someone cracks/scratches/stains an expensive stone slab). We’ve actually heard a ton of helpful info from those of you with butcher block counters about how to seal them / treat them so they look good and last, so we’ll definitely be sharing all of that once they’re in (and we’ll be honest about how they hold up too – so stay tuned for photos and stuff as they get used and abused).

Orlando’s kitchen was also reassuring because he used the exact fridge we were considering. We don’t have space for a large fridge and we worried this one might look cheap, but – phew! – it looks great.

All of these decisions were made back in April, and we happened to lock everything in right as Ikea was having their semi-annual Kitchen Event Sale (more on that in podcast episode #52). The total (for cabinets and counters) would’ve been about $3200 – but we got 20% off our entire order thanks to the sale. Which saved us about $600 and brought the total closer to $2,600. That even includes the sink, soft close drawers/doors, and a pull-out trash can!

But even with most of the big items ordered, we still had lighting to figure out. Our first challenge was actual brightness, because I, John Petersik, am a lighting over-thinker to the Nth degree. First, we nixed the idea of adding recessed can lighting because we worried it would feel too “new” for the look we wanted in this 100 year old house. We have a few recessed lights elsewhere, so we’re not totally against them for the house, but the kitchen/dining room ceiling is SUCH a large plane, we wanted to avoid having a bunch of glowing circles dotting those pretty extra-high ceilings.

In the past we’ve relied on recessed lights to provide most of the functional lighting in our own kitchens, with pendants providing task and accent lighting. But in the beach house, our kitchen lighting – two island pendants and three sconces (along with two lights over the dining table nearby) – would need to do it all. So we quickly realized we needed to nix anything with a solid shade, so that every bulb could cast light in all directions instead of just shining it down. For instance, anything like the ones in our house’s kitchen were immediately out of the running. Sorry, guys.

Even with that no-shades rule helping us narrow things down, we still had a ton of lights that we were considering. So I mocked up this graphic to get a better sense of how our options looked with the rest of the kitchen. This was a failed option we were just playing around with at first (note the solid shades on both the sconces and pendants) but it was a huge help to see things this way. The subway backsplash isn’t for sure either, just a nice simple choice that lets us focus on what lights could work best:

We considered a few multi-light pendants, but most of them got eliminated for being the wrong style (these felt too modern) or so large that they dwarfed the island (or broke the bank).

A lot of the lights we typically would choose in a heartbeat (like these guys from Ballard Designs) felt too traditional for the vibe we were going for once we saw them in the mockup. Much of that had to do with the pink stove I think. It’s really cool and old and fun, but it might not lend itself to anything too formal.

The other thing we started bumping up against was scale. For instance, we started to think these beauties were the answer to all of our problems: glass shades, vintage look, right finish…

…but I was alarmed by 6″ measurement in its description (and that was the LARGER option they offered). My rendering above wasn’t to scale, so I started making a new version that was a bit more representative of size – particularly of the light in proportion to the eight foot island. That shed A LOT of light on the situation (pun completely intended). These were definitely too small.

I’ll cut to the chase. We ended up with this, as you saw in the original mood board up top. The pendants are 15″ wide and the clear shades allow them to throw light in every direction. Oh how I wish they were still on the Internet to link to them for you (they’re even prettier in person than in photos) but they seem to be out of stock everywhere. They were Trent Austin from Wayfair, so cross your fingers they come back someday.

We love how large the glass shades are without feeling heavy. The room instantly feels a lot closer to “done” with them hung, like they’re just begging for an island to be there. And the rest of the cabinets. And the appliances.

The sconces have shades that are wire mesh, so the light passes through them just like we wanted. We actually saw them in a showhouse shortly after ordering them and they looked GREAT all lit up. You can see how they’re not solid a bit better in this shot (there’s one more across the room too, which you can see in the second picture in this post).

Okay and one last mock-up. We also did this one that included plans for the adjacent dining area, just to try to picture how that would work with everything going on in the kitchen. Of course it has a pair of capiz pendants, because it wouldn’t be a beach house without Sherry’s favorite material of all time.

We opted for two lights over the dining table so that from the couch in the living room, the kitchen lights wouldn’t intersect at an odd place (once centered fixture would have). We also thought it would be fun to try two smaller pendants instead of one large chandelier. They don’t look great in the shot above because they’re hung higher than they’ll eventually go (and there’s no table under them to ground them). Oh yeah and the capiz is all still wrapped in its plastic shipping. Mummified capiz is the new black.

So that’s where we are. We’re headed out there soon to finish restoring the tub upstairs and to see how a few last floor repairs went upstairs. There are just a few tiny things on the to-do list (like finishing a railing for the back stairs) and then floor sanding and sealing can begin! After that, we can finally get started on making this kitchen come to life… and finally get those Ikea boxes out of our garage, which I’m also pretty stoked about.

Psst- You can read all about our past progress at the beach house by clicking into Our Beach House category. 

*This post contains affiliate links

The post How We Planned The Beach House Kitchen appeared first on Young House Love.

[lukerhill]

How We Planned The Beach House Kitchen

The beach house kitchen will be our seventh kitchen project (!!!) after redoing three of our own (this one’s our favorite), a showhouse that we did in 2014, a spec house for a local builder in 2016 (seen below – we loved that blue tile), and a local teachers’ lounge that we redid last year.

And while that sounds like a lot of kitchens to have under our belts, the process can still feel pretty daunting – probably just due to the sheer number of decisions that a kitchen reno brings. “What’s the most functional layout? Is that too many drawers or not enough? Will I live to regret the lighting? Is it all going to come in within budget?” So many questions. And decisions. And changing of minds.

But as much work as it is to plan, stress, overthink, and replan a kitchen – it can easily be one of the biggest improvements you can make to a house. And now that we’re so close to FINALLY installing the beach house kitchen (hello light at the end of the tunnel!), we thought we’d take you through the steps (and kitchen planning tools) that we used to make our plan.

That photo above is what the space looked like as of last week. The lights are hung, trim is getting painted, and the floor holes are all patched with matching reclaimed pine. Once they’re sanded and sealed we can begin the kitchen install! It’s feeling very real all of a sudden. And it’s a far cry from what it looked like when we first started planning the space last year:

I won’t rehash all of the floor planning we did (it’s in this post) but you can see where we ended up below. Well, mostly ended up (the master bath got rearranged one more time to accommodate a shower). But the important part is the kitchen, which you can see in the upper left of these schematics:

We made those initial floor plans in Photoshop (like I’m sure all the professional architects do…. right?) so it wasn’t precisely to scale and not even close to something we could rely on to order cabinets. So having made the decision to order our cabinetry from Ikea, we turned to their free 3D kitchen planning software.

It’s not my favorite interface in the world (you can read all my pros & cons in this post) but if you’re using Ikea products, it’s a great way to plan the precise items you’ll need. We also used it when ordering our laundry room cabinets and our bonus room built-ins (shown below), both of which we’ve been very happy with – so Ikea was a no-brainer for keeping the beach house kitchen looking good, without costing a fortune.

We went through a few different ideas and layouts within the software – like do we do upper cabinets or skip them? We eventually landed on no uppers, just because we’re suckers for open shelves and the cabinets were looking pretty heavy in the rendering, even in white (we want the room to feel balanced, not left-heavy with too much stuff on that wall as you walk into the room). And since this is going to be a weekly vacation rental, nobody is going to be living here for months on end, so we realized we’d have plenty of storage space for vacation goers – especially with the extra cabinets that we added to flank the back door.

One challenge with the Ikea software is that you can’t pull in products that aren’t theirs – so I couldn’t render our 40″ pink stove or the exact dimensions of the fridge we’ve had our eye on. And I can never get their shelves to look the way I want (this is reminding me that I really need to relearn Google SketchUp). So the renderings are a little imperfect, but this one is probably the closest to what it’ll be like (just add sconces, pendants, and shelves in your mind).

Before ordering, we also loosely mapped things out in real life to make sure we liked the clearance of everything. You can see our fancy stand-ins for the island. Not the big saw, just the wood scraps on the floor. Told you they were fancy.

It’s also pretty hard to get a sense of the finishes in these renderings, so we ended up making some mood boards to be sure we liked the road we were headed down. Here’s the final one, but I’ll show you how we got to this mix in a second:

1. Stove / 2. Faucet / 3. Hood / 4. Sconces / 5. Island Pendants / 6. Counter (inspo pic) / 7. Cabinet doors / 8. Fridge (inspo pic)

From the get-go, Sherry and I both agreed we wanted this kitchen to feel casual and unfussy. The beach is supposed to be relaxing, so we wanted the kitchen to feel the same way. One of our first big inspiration pictures is shown above as #7, because it just looks very chill. Still plenty nice, but not too formal or uptight (which is generally right where we’re aiming with this beach house). Sorry, I can’t find a source better than this one.

The flat-fronted cabinets really stood out to us in that picture because we’ve never been drawn to them before. They always struck us as crazy modern or too commercial (like a school cafeteria from the 90’s). But after hunting down more inspiration photos on Pinterest, we were officially flat-front converts for the beach house.

(sources: left image, right image)

You’ll also notice that 4 out of these 5 photos don’t show upper cabinets, which further confirmed our lean towards a more unfussy/casual look with lots of open space for the eye to move around.

(sources: left image, right image)

We haven’t chosen hardware yet because we’re waiting to see how everything looks once we have it installed – but the idea of leather pulls is pretty cool (and clearly they’re very popular with flat-front drawers). We’re considering a few other options, and we also might try to hunt down some wood knobs to play off of some of the old wood doorknobs in the house. We’re hoping the right choice will be much clearer once we can actually hold up some samples in the finished space, but here are a few of the ones we’re considering: 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 7 / 8 / 9

Another big source of inspiration for us is Orlando’s kitchen. He revealed it on Emily Henderson’s blog right around the time we were ordering ours, so it helped us lock in our decision to do butcher block counters (we actually switched our plan last minute to get the exact ones that he chose – these from Ikea). We even ordered extra butcher block so we can make our floating shelves from the same stuff.

(source)

People have mixed feeling about butcher block in a rental, but we like that it’s affordable (like 10 times more affordable than some other options) and we LOVE that we can sand and refinish any major beatings that it might take (can’t say that if someone cracks/scratches/stains an expensive stone slab). We’ve actually heard a ton of helpful info from those of you with butcher block counters about how to seal them / treat them so they look good and last, so we’ll definitely be sharing all of that once they’re in (and we’ll be honest about how they hold up too – so stay tuned for photos and stuff as they get used and abused).

Orlando’s kitchen was also reassuring because he used the exact fridge we were considering. We don’t have space for a large fridge and we worried this one might look cheap, but – phew! – it looks great.

All of these decisions were made back in April, and we happened to lock everything in right as Ikea was having their semi-annual Kitchen Event Sale (more on that in podcast episode #52). The total (for cabinets and counters) would’ve been about $3200 – but we got 20% off our entire order thanks to the sale. Which saved us about $600 and brought the total closer to $2,600. That even includes the sink, soft close drawers/doors, and a pull-out trash can!

But even with most of the big items ordered, we still had lighting to figure out. Our first challenge was actual brightness, because I, John Petersik, am a lighting over-thinker to the Nth degree. First, we nixed the idea of adding recessed can lighting because we worried it would feel too “new” for the look we wanted in this 100 year old house. We have a few recessed lights elsewhere, so we’re not totally against them for the house, but the kitchen/dining room ceiling is SUCH a large plane, we wanted to avoid having a bunch of glowing circles dotting those pretty extra-high ceilings.

In the past we’ve relied on recessed lights to provide most of the functional lighting in our own kitchens, with pendants providing task and accent lighting. But in the beach house, our kitchen lighting – two island pendants and three sconces (along with two lights over the dining table nearby) – would need to do it all. So we quickly realized we needed to nix anything with a solid shade, so that every bulb could cast light in all directions instead of just shining it down. For instance, anything like the ones in our house’s kitchen were immediately out of the running. Sorry, guys.

Even with that no-shades rule helping us narrow things down, we still had a ton of lights that we were considering. So I mocked up this graphic to get a better sense of how our options looked with the rest of the kitchen. This was a failed option we were just playing around with at first (note the solid shades on both the sconces and pendants) but it was a huge help to see things this way. The subway backsplash isn’t for sure either, just a nice simple choice that lets us focus on what lights could work best:

We considered a few multi-light pendants, but most of them got eliminated for being the wrong style (these felt too modern) or so large that they dwarfed the island (or broke the bank).

A lot of the lights we typically would choose in a heartbeat (like these guys from Ballard Designs) felt too traditional for the vibe we were going for once we saw them in the mockup. Much of that had to do with the pink stove I think. It’s really cool and old and fun, but it might not lend itself to anything too formal.

The other thing we started bumping up against was scale. For instance, we started to think these beauties were the answer to all of our problems: glass shades, vintage look, right finish…

…but I was alarmed by 6″ measurement in its description (and that was the LARGER option they offered). My rendering above wasn’t to scale, so I started making a new version that was a bit more representative of size – particularly of the light in proportion to the eight foot island. That shed A LOT of light on the situation (pun completely intended). These were definitely too small.

I’ll cut to the chase. We ended up with this, as you saw in the original mood board up top. The pendants are 15″ wide and the clear shades allow them to throw light in every direction. Oh how I wish they were still on the Internet to link to them for you (they’re even prettier in person than in photos) but they seem to be out of stock everywhere. They were Trent Austin from Wayfair, so cross your fingers they come back someday.

We love how large the glass shades are without feeling heavy. The room instantly feels a lot closer to “done” with them hung, like they’re just begging for an island to be there. And the rest of the cabinets. And the appliances.

The sconces have shades that are wire mesh, so the light passes through them just like we wanted. We actually saw them in a showhouse shortly after ordering them and they looked GREAT all lit up. You can see how they’re not solid a bit better in this shot (there’s one more across the room too, which you can see in the second picture in this post).

Okay and one last mock-up. We also did this one that included plans for the adjacent dining area, just to try to picture how that would work with everything going on in the kitchen. Of course it has a pair of capiz pendants, because it wouldn’t be a beach house without Sherry’s favorite material of all time.

We opted for two lights over the dining table so that from the couch in the living room, the kitchen lights wouldn’t intersect at an odd place (once centered fixture would have). We also thought it would be fun to try two smaller pendants instead of one large chandelier. They don’t look great in the shot above because they’re hung higher than they’ll eventually go (and there’s no table under them to ground them). Oh yeah and the capiz is all still wrapped in its plastic shipping. Mummified capiz is the new black.

So that’s where we are. We’re headed out there soon to finish restoring the tub upstairs and to see how a few last floor repairs went upstairs. There are just a few tiny things on the to-do list (like finishing a railing for the back stairs) and then floor sanding and sealing can begin! After that, we can finally get started on making this kitchen come to life… and finally get those Ikea boxes out of our garage, which I’m also pretty stoked about.

Psst- You can read all about our past progress at the beach house by clicking into Our Beach House category. 

*This post contains affiliate links

The post How We Planned The Beach House Kitchen appeared first on Young House Love.

[interiorstarweb]

How We Planned The Beach House Kitchen

The beach house kitchen will be our seventh kitchen project (!!!) after redoing three of our own (this one’s our favorite), a showhouse that we did in 2014, a spec house for a local builder in 2016 (seen below – we loved that blue tile), and a local teachers’ lounge that we redid last year.

And while that sounds like a lot of kitchens to have under our belts, the process can still feel pretty daunting – probably just due to the sheer number of decisions that a kitchen reno brings. “What’s the most functional layout? Is that too many drawers or not enough? Will I live to regret the lighting? Is it all going to come in within budget?” So many questions. And decisions. And changing of minds.

But as much work as it is to plan, stress, overthink, and replan a kitchen – it can easily be one of the biggest improvements you can make to a house. And now that we’re so close to FINALLY installing the beach house kitchen (hello light at the end of the tunnel!), we thought we’d take you through the steps (and kitchen planning tools) that we used to make our plan.

That photo above is what the space looked like as of last week. The lights are hung, trim is getting painted, and the floor holes are all patched with matching reclaimed pine. Once they’re sanded and sealed we can begin the kitchen install! It’s feeling very real all of a sudden. And it’s a far cry from what it looked like when we first started planning the space last year:

I won’t rehash all of the floor planning we did (it’s in this post) but you can see where we ended up below. Well, mostly ended up (the master bath got rearranged one more time to accommodate a shower). But the important part is the kitchen, which you can see in the upper left of these schematics:

We made those initial floor plans in Photoshop (like I’m sure all the professional architects do…. right?) so it wasn’t precisely to scale and not even close to something we could rely on to order cabinets. So having made the decision to order our cabinetry from Ikea, we turned to their free 3D kitchen planning software.

It’s not my favorite interface in the world (you can read all my pros & cons in this post) but if you’re using Ikea products, it’s a great way to plan the precise items you’ll need. We also used it when ordering our laundry room cabinets and our bonus room built-ins (shown below), both of which we’ve been very happy with – so Ikea was a no-brainer for keeping the beach house kitchen looking good, without costing a fortune.

We went through a few different ideas and layouts within the software – like do we do upper cabinets or skip them? We eventually landed on no uppers, just because we’re suckers for open shelves and the cabinets were looking pretty heavy in the rendering, even in white (we want the room to feel balanced, not left-heavy with too much stuff on that wall as you walk into the room). And since this is going to be a weekly vacation rental, nobody is going to be living here for months on end, so we realized we’d have plenty of storage space for vacation goers – especially with the extra cabinets that we added to flank the back door.

One challenge with the Ikea software is that you can’t pull in products that aren’t theirs – so I couldn’t render our 40″ pink stove or the exact dimensions of the fridge we’ve had our eye on. And I can never get their shelves to look the way I want (this is reminding me that I really need to relearn Google SketchUp). So the renderings are a little imperfect, but this one is probably the closest to what it’ll be like (just add sconces, pendants, and shelves in your mind).

Before ordering, we also loosely mapped things out in real life to make sure we liked the clearance of everything. You can see our fancy stand-ins for the island. Not the big saw, just the wood scraps on the floor. Told you they were fancy.

It’s also pretty hard to get a sense of the finishes in these renderings, so we ended up making some mood boards to be sure we liked the road we were headed down. Here’s the final one, but I’ll show you how we got to this mix in a second:

1. Stove / 2. Faucet / 3. Hood / 4. Sconces / 5. Island Pendants / 6. Counter (inspo pic) / 7. Cabinet doors / 8. Fridge (inspo pic)

From the get-go, Sherry and I both agreed we wanted this kitchen to feel casual and unfussy. The beach is supposed to be relaxing, so we wanted the kitchen to feel the same way. One of our first big inspiration pictures is shown above as #7, because it just looks very chill. Still plenty nice, but not too formal or uptight (which is generally right where we’re aiming with this beach house). Sorry, I can’t find a source better than this one.

The flat-fronted cabinets really stood out to us in that picture because we’ve never been drawn to them before. They always struck us as crazy modern or too commercial (like a school cafeteria from the 90’s). But after hunting down more inspiration photos on Pinterest, we were officially flat-front converts for the beach house.

(sources: left image, right image)

You’ll also notice that 4 out of these 5 photos don’t show upper cabinets, which further confirmed our lean towards a more unfussy/casual look with lots of open space for the eye to move around.

(sources: left image, right image)

We haven’t chosen hardware yet because we’re waiting to see how everything looks once we have it installed – but the idea of leather pulls is pretty cool (and clearly they’re very popular with flat-front drawers). We’re considering a few other options, and we also might try to hunt down some wood knobs to play off of some of the old wood doorknobs in the house. We’re hoping the right choice will be much clearer once we can actually hold up some samples in the finished space, but here are a few of the ones we’re considering: 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 7 / 8 / 9

Another big source of inspiration for us is Orlando’s kitchen. He revealed it on Emily Henderson’s blog right around the time we were ordering ours, so it helped us lock in our decision to do butcher block counters (we actually switched our plan last minute to get the exact ones that he chose – these from Ikea). We even ordered extra butcher block so we can make our floating shelves from the same stuff.

(source)

People have mixed feeling about butcher block in a rental, but we like that it’s affordable (like 10 times more affordable than some other options) and we LOVE that we can sand and refinish any major beatings that it might take (can’t say that if someone cracks/scratches/stains an expensive stone slab). We’ve actually heard a ton of helpful info from those of you with butcher block counters about how to seal them / treat them so they look good and last, so we’ll definitely be sharing all of that once they’re in (and we’ll be honest about how they hold up too – so stay tuned for photos and stuff as they get used and abused).

Orlando’s kitchen was also reassuring because he used the exact fridge we were considering. We don’t have space for a large fridge and we worried this one might look cheap, but – phew! – it looks great.

All of these decisions were made back in April, and we happened to lock everything in right as Ikea was having their semi-annual Kitchen Event Sale (more on that in podcast episode #52). The total (for cabinets and counters) would’ve been about $3200 – but we got 20% off our entire order thanks to the sale. Which saved us about $600 and brought the total closer to $2,600. That even includes the sink, soft close drawers/doors, and a pull-out trash can!

But even with most of the big items ordered, we still had lighting to figure out. Our first challenge was actual brightness, because I, John Petersik, am a lighting over-thinker to the Nth degree. First, we nixed the idea of adding recessed can lighting because we worried it would feel too “new” for the look we wanted in this 100 year old house. We have a few recessed lights elsewhere, so we’re not totally against them for the house, but the kitchen/dining room ceiling is SUCH a large plane, we wanted to avoid having a bunch of glowing circles dotting those pretty extra-high ceilings.

In the past we’ve relied on recessed lights to provide most of the functional lighting in our own kitchens, with pendants providing task and accent lighting. But in the beach house, our kitchen lighting – two island pendants and three sconces (along with two lights over the dining table nearby) – would need to do it all. So we quickly realized we needed to nix anything with a solid shade, so that every bulb could cast light in all directions instead of just shining it down. For instance, anything like the ones in our house’s kitchen were immediately out of the running. Sorry, guys.

Even with that no-shades rule helping us narrow things down, we still had a ton of lights that we were considering. So I mocked up this graphic to get a better sense of how our options looked with the rest of the kitchen. This was a failed option we were just playing around with at first (note the solid shades on both the sconces and pendants) but it was a huge help to see things this way. The subway backsplash isn’t for sure either, just a nice simple choice that lets us focus on what lights could work best:

We considered a few multi-light pendants, but most of them got eliminated for being the wrong style (these felt too modern) or so large that they dwarfed the island (or broke the bank).

A lot of the lights we typically would choose in a heartbeat (like these guys from Ballard Designs) felt too traditional for the vibe we were going for once we saw them in the mockup. Much of that had to do with the pink stove I think. It’s really cool and old and fun, but it might not lend itself to anything too formal.

The other thing we started bumping up against was scale. For instance, we started to think these beauties were the answer to all of our problems: glass shades, vintage look, right finish…

…but I was alarmed by 6″ measurement in its description (and that was the LARGER option they offered). My rendering above wasn’t to scale, so I started making a new version that was a bit more representative of size – particularly of the light in proportion to the eight foot island. That shed A LOT of light on the situation (pun completely intended). These were definitely too small.

I’ll cut to the chase. We ended up with this, as you saw in the original mood board up top. The pendants are 15″ wide and the clear shades allow them to throw light in every direction. Oh how I wish they were still on the Internet to link to them for you (they’re even prettier in person than in photos) but they seem to be out of stock everywhere. They were Trent Austin from Wayfair, so cross your fingers they come back someday.

We love how large the glass shades are without feeling heavy. The room instantly feels a lot closer to “done” with them hung, like they’re just begging for an island to be there. And the rest of the cabinets. And the appliances.

The sconces have shades that are wire mesh, so the light passes through them just like we wanted. We actually saw them in a showhouse shortly after ordering them and they looked GREAT all lit up. You can see how they’re not solid a bit better in this shot (there’s one more across the room too, which you can see in the second picture in this post).

Okay and one last mock-up. We also did this one that included plans for the adjacent dining area, just to try to picture how that would work with everything going on in the kitchen. Of course it has a pair of capiz pendants, because it wouldn’t be a beach house without Sherry’s favorite material of all time.

We opted for two lights over the dining table so that from the couch in the living room, the kitchen lights wouldn’t intersect at an odd place (once centered fixture would have). We also thought it would be fun to try two smaller pendants instead of one large chandelier. They don’t look great in the shot above because they’re hung higher than they’ll eventually go (and there’s no table under them to ground them). Oh yeah and the capiz is all still wrapped in its plastic shipping. Mummified capiz is the new black.

So that’s where we are. We’re headed out there soon to finish restoring the tub upstairs and to see how a few last floor repairs went upstairs. There are just a few tiny things on the to-do list (like finishing a railing for the back stairs) and then floor sanding and sealing can begin! After that, we can finally get started on making this kitchen come to life… and finally get those Ikea boxes out of our garage, which I’m also pretty stoked about.

Psst- You can read all about our past progress at the beach house by clicking into Our Beach House category. 

*This post contains affiliate links

The post How We Planned The Beach House Kitchen appeared first on Young House Love.

How We Planned The Beach House Kitchen published first on http://ift.tt/2uiWrIt

[woodcraftor]

How We Planned The Beach House Kitchen

The beach house kitchen will be our seventh kitchen project (!!!) after redoing three of our own (this one’s our favorite), a showhouse that we did in 2014, a spec house for a local builder in 2016 (seen below – we loved that blue tile), and a local teachers’ lounge that we redid last year.

And while that sounds like a lot of kitchens to have under our belts, the process can still feel pretty daunting – probably just due to the sheer number of decisions that a kitchen reno brings. “What’s the most functional layout? Is that too many drawers or not enough? Will I live to regret the lighting? Is it all going to come in within budget?” So many questions. And decisions. And changing of minds.

But as much work as it is to plan, stress, overthink, and replan a kitchen – it can easily be one of the biggest improvements you can make to a house. And now that we’re so close to FINALLY installing the beach house kitchen (hello light at the end of the tunnel!), we thought we’d take you through the steps (and kitchen planning tools) that we used to make our plan.

That photo above is what the space looked like as of last week. The lights are hung, trim is getting painted, and the floor holes are all patched with matching reclaimed pine. Once they’re sanded and sealed we can begin the kitchen install! It’s feeling very real all of a sudden. And it’s a far cry from what it looked like when we first started planning the space last year:

I won’t rehash all of the floor planning we did (it’s in this post) but you can see where we ended up below. Well, mostly ended up (the master bath got rearranged one more time to accommodate a shower). But the important part is the kitchen, which you can see in the upper left of these schematics:

We made those initial floor plans in Photoshop (like I’m sure all the professional architects do…. right?) so it wasn’t precisely to scale and not even close to something we could rely on to order cabinets. So having made the decision to order our cabinetry from Ikea, we turned to their free 3D kitchen planning software.

It’s not my favorite interface in the world (you can read all my pros & cons in this post) but if you’re using Ikea products, it’s a great way to plan the precise items you’ll need. We also used it when ordering our laundry room cabinets and our bonus room built-ins (shown below), both of which we’ve been very happy with – so Ikea was a no-brainer for keeping the beach house kitchen looking good, without costing a fortune.

We went through a few different ideas and layouts within the software – like do we do upper cabinets or skip them? We eventually landed on no uppers, just because we’re suckers for open shelves and the cabinets were looking pretty heavy in the rendering, even in white (we want the room to feel balanced, not left-heavy with too much stuff on that wall as you walk into the room). And since this is going to be a weekly vacation rental, nobody is going to be living here for months on end, so we realized we’d have plenty of storage space for vacation goers – especially with the extra cabinets that we added to flank the back door.

One challenge with the Ikea software is that you can’t pull in products that aren’t theirs – so I couldn’t render our 40″ pink stove or the exact dimensions of the fridge we’ve had our eye on. And I can never get their shelves to look the way I want (this is reminding me that I really need to relearn Google SketchUp). So the renderings are a little imperfect, but this one is probably the closest to what it’ll be like (just add sconces, pendants, and shelves in your mind).

Before ordering, we also loosely mapped things out in real life to make sure we liked the clearance of everything. You can see our fancy stand-ins for the island. Not the big saw, just the wood scraps on the floor. Told you they were fancy.

It’s also pretty hard to get a sense of the finishes in these renderings, so we ended up making some mood boards to be sure we liked the road we were headed down. Here’s the final one, but I’ll show you how we got to this mix in a second:

1. Stove / 2. Faucet / 3. Hood / 4. Sconces / 5. Island Pendants / 6. Counter (inspo pic) / 7. Cabinet doors / 8. Fridge (inspo pic)

From the get-go, Sherry and I both agreed we wanted this kitchen to feel casual and unfussy. The beach is supposed to be relaxing, so we wanted the kitchen to feel the same way. One of our first big inspiration pictures is shown above as #7, because it just looks very chill. Still plenty nice, but not too formal or uptight (which is generally right where we’re aiming with this beach house). Sorry, I can’t find a source better than this one.

The flat-fronted cabinets really stood out to us in that picture because we’ve never been drawn to them before. They always struck us as crazy modern or too commercial (like a school cafeteria from the 90’s). But after hunting down more inspiration photos on Pinterest, we were officially flat-front converts for the beach house.

(sources: left image, right image)

You’ll also notice that 4 out of these 5 photos don’t show upper cabinets, which further confirmed our lean towards a more unfussy/casual look with lots of open space for the eye to move around.

(sources: left image, right image)

We haven’t chosen hardware yet because we’re waiting to see how everything looks once we have it installed – but the idea of leather pulls is pretty cool (and clearly they’re very popular with flat-front drawers). We’re considering a few other options, and we also might try to hunt down some wood knobs to play off of some of the old wood doorknobs in the house. We’re hoping the right choice will be much clearer once we can actually hold up some samples in the finished space, but here are a few of the ones we’re considering: 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 7 / 8 / 9

Another big source of inspiration for us is Orlando’s kitchen. He revealed it on Emily Henderson’s blog right around the time we were ordering ours, so it helped us lock in our decision to do butcher block counters (we actually switched our plan last minute to get the exact ones that he chose – these from Ikea). We even ordered extra butcher block so we can make our floating shelves from the same stuff.

(source)

People have mixed feeling about butcher block in a rental, but we like that it’s affordable (like 10 times more affordable than some other options) and we LOVE that we can sand and refinish any major beatings that it might take (can’t say that if someone cracks/scratches/stains an expensive stone slab). We’ve actually heard a ton of helpful info from those of you with butcher block counters about how to seal them / treat them so they look good and last, so we’ll definitely be sharing all of that once they’re in (and we’ll be honest about how they hold up too – so stay tuned for photos and stuff as they get used and abused).

Orlando’s kitchen was also reassuring because he used the exact fridge we were considering. We don’t have space for a large fridge and we worried this one might look cheap, but – phew! – it looks great.

All of these decisions were made back in April, and we happened to lock everything in right as Ikea was having their semi-annual Kitchen Event Sale (more on that in podcast episode #52). The total (for cabinets and counters) would’ve been about $3200 – but we got 20% off our entire order thanks to the sale. Which saved us about $600 and brought the total closer to $2,600. That even includes the sink, soft close drawers/doors, and a pull-out trash can!

But even with most of the big items ordered, we still had lighting to figure out. Our first challenge was actual brightness, because I, John Petersik, am a lighting over-thinker to the Nth degree. First, we nixed the idea of adding recessed can lighting because we worried it would feel too “new” for the look we wanted in this 100 year old house. We have a few recessed lights elsewhere, so we’re not totally against them for the house, but the kitchen/dining room ceiling is SUCH a large plane, we wanted to avoid having a bunch of glowing circles dotting those pretty extra-high ceilings.

In the past we’ve relied on recessed lights to provide most of the functional lighting in our own kitchens, with pendants providing task and accent lighting. But in the beach house, our kitchen lighting – two island pendants and three sconces (along with two lights over the dining table nearby) – would need to do it all. So we quickly realized we needed to nix anything with a solid shade, so that every bulb could cast light in all directions instead of just shining it down. For instance, anything like the ones in our house’s kitchen were immediately out of the running. Sorry, guys.

Even with that no-shades rule helping us narrow things down, we still had a ton of lights that we were considering. So I mocked up this graphic to get a better sense of how our options looked with the rest of the kitchen. This was a failed option we were just playing around with at first (note the solid shades on both the sconces and pendants) but it was a huge help to see things this way. The subway backsplash isn’t for sure either, just a nice simple choice that lets us focus on what lights could work best:

We considered a few multi-light pendants, but most of them got eliminated for being the wrong style (these felt too modern) or so large that they dwarfed the island (or broke the bank).

A lot of the lights we typically would choose in a heartbeat (like these guys from Ballard Designs) felt too traditional for the vibe we were going for once we saw them in the mockup. Much of that had to do with the pink stove I think. It’s really cool and old and fun, but it might not lend itself to anything too formal.

The other thing we started bumping up against was scale. For instance, we started to think these beauties were the answer to all of our problems: glass shades, vintage look, right finish…

…but I was alarmed by 6″ measurement in its description (and that was the LARGER option they offered). My rendering above wasn’t to scale, so I started making a new version that was a bit more representative of size – particularly of the light in proportion to the eight foot island. That shed A LOT of light on the situation (pun completely intended). These were definitely too small.

I’ll cut to the chase. We ended up with this, as you saw in the original mood board up top. The pendants are 15″ wide and the clear shades allow them to throw light in every direction. Oh how I wish they were still on the Internet to link to them for you (they’re even prettier in person than in photos) but they seem to be out of stock everywhere. They were Trent Austin from Wayfair, so cross your fingers they come back someday.

We love how large the glass shades are without feeling heavy. The room instantly feels a lot closer to “done” with them hung, like they’re just begging for an island to be there. And the rest of the cabinets. And the appliances.

The sconces have shades that are wire mesh, so the light passes through them just like we wanted. We actually saw them in a showhouse shortly after ordering them and they looked GREAT all lit up. You can see how they’re not solid a bit better in this shot (there’s one more across the room too, which you can see in the second picture in this post).

Okay and one last mock-up. We also did this one that included plans for the adjacent dining area, just to try to picture how that would work with everything going on in the kitchen. Of course it has a pair of capiz pendants, because it wouldn’t be a beach house without Sherry’s favorite material of all time.

We opted for two lights over the dining table so that from the couch in the living room, the kitchen lights wouldn’t intersect at an odd place (once centered fixture would have). We also thought it would be fun to try two smaller pendants instead of one large chandelier. They don’t look great in the shot above because they’re hung higher than they’ll eventually go (and there’s no table under them to ground them). Oh yeah and the capiz is all still wrapped in its plastic shipping. Mummified capiz is the new black.

So that’s where we are. We’re headed out there soon to finish restoring the tub upstairs and to see how a few last floor repairs went upstairs. There are just a few tiny things on the to-do list (like finishing a railing for the back stairs) and then floor sanding and sealing can begin! After that, we can finally get started on making this kitchen come to life… and finally get those Ikea boxes out of our garage, which I’m also pretty stoked about.

Psst- You can read all about our past progress at the beach house by clicking into Our Beach House category. 

*This post contains affiliate links

The post How We Planned The Beach House Kitchen appeared first on Young House Love.

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[vincentbnaughton]

How We Planned The Beach House Kitchen

The beach house kitchen will be our seventh kitchen project (!!!) after redoing three of our own (this one’s our favorite), a showhouse that we did in 2014, a spec house for a local builder in 2016 (seen below – we loved that blue tile), and a local teachers’ lounge that we redid last year.

And while that sounds like a lot of kitchens to have under our belts, the process can still feel pretty daunting – probably just due to the sheer number of decisions that a kitchen reno brings. “What’s the most functional layout? Is that too many drawers or not enough? Will I live to regret the lighting? Is it all going to come in within budget?” So many questions. And decisions. And changing of minds.

But as much work as it is to plan, stress, overthink, and replan a kitchen – it can easily be one of the biggest improvements you can make to a house. And now that we’re so close to FINALLY installing the beach house kitchen (hello light at the end of the tunnel!), we thought we’d take you through the steps (and kitchen planning tools) that we used to make our plan.

That photo above is what the space looked like as of last week. The lights are hung, trim is getting painted, and the floor holes are all patched with matching reclaimed pine. Once they’re sanded and sealed we can begin the kitchen install! It’s feeling very real all of a sudden. And it’s a far cry from what it looked like when we first started planning the space last year:

I won’t rehash all of the floor planning we did (it’s in this post) but you can see where we ended up below. Well, mostly ended up (the master bath got rearranged one more time to accommodate a shower). But the important part is the kitchen, which you can see in the upper left of these schematics:

We made those initial floor plans in Photoshop (like I’m sure all the professional architects do…. right?) so it wasn’t precisely to scale and not even close to something we could rely on to order cabinets. So having made the decision to order our cabinetry from Ikea, we turned to their free 3D kitchen planning software.

It’s not my favorite interface in the world (you can read all my pros & cons in this post) but if you’re using Ikea products, it’s a great way to plan the precise items you’ll need. We also used it when ordering our laundry room cabinets and our bonus room built-ins (shown below), both of which we’ve been very happy with – so Ikea was a no-brainer for keeping the beach house kitchen looking good, without costing a fortune.

We went through a few different ideas and layouts within the software – like do we do upper cabinets or skip them? We eventually landed on no uppers, just because we’re suckers for open shelves and the cabinets were looking pretty heavy in the rendering, even in white (we want the room to feel balanced, not left-heavy with too much stuff on that wall as you walk into the room). And since this is going to be a weekly vacation rental, nobody is going to be living here for months on end, so we realized we’d have plenty of storage space for vacation goers – especially with the extra cabinets that we added to flank the back door.

One challenge with the Ikea software is that you can’t pull in products that aren’t theirs – so I couldn’t render our 40″ pink stove or the exact dimensions of the fridge we’ve had our eye on. And I can never get their shelves to look the way I want (this is reminding me that I really need to relearn Google SketchUp). So the renderings are a little imperfect, but this one is probably the closest to what it’ll be like (just add sconces, pendants, and shelves in your mind).

Before ordering, we also loosely mapped things out in real life to make sure we liked the clearance of everything. You can see our fancy stand-ins for the island. Not the big saw, just the wood scraps on the floor. Told you they were fancy.

It’s also pretty hard to get a sense of the finishes in these renderings, so we ended up making some mood boards to be sure we liked the road we were headed down. Here’s the final one, but I’ll show you how we got to this mix in a second:

1. Stove / 2. Faucet / 3. Hood / 4. Sconces / 5. Island Pendants / 6. Counter (inspo pic) / 7. Cabinet doors / 8. Fridge (inspo pic)

From the get-go, Sherry and I both agreed we wanted this kitchen to feel casual and unfussy. The beach is supposed to be relaxing, so we wanted the kitchen to feel the same way. One of our first big inspiration pictures is shown above as #7, because it just looks very chill. Still plenty nice, but not too formal or uptight (which is generally right where we’re aiming with this beach house). Sorry, I can’t find a source better than this one.

The flat-fronted cabinets really stood out to us in that picture because we’ve never been drawn to them before. They always struck us as crazy modern or too commercial (like a school cafeteria from the 90’s). But after hunting down more inspiration photos on Pinterest, we were officially flat-front converts for the beach house.

(sources: left image, right image)

You’ll also notice that 4 out of these 5 photos don’t show upper cabinets, which further confirmed our lean towards a more unfussy/casual look with lots of open space for the eye to move around.

(sources: left image, right image)

We haven’t chosen hardware yet because we’re waiting to see how everything looks once we have it installed – but the idea of leather pulls is pretty cool (and clearly they’re very popular with flat-front drawers). We’re considering a few other options, and we also might try to hunt down some wood knobs to play off of some of the old wood doorknobs in the house. We’re hoping the right choice will be much clearer once we can actually hold up some samples in the finished space, but here are a few of the ones we’re considering: 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 7 / 8 / 9

Another big source of inspiration for us is Orlando’s kitchen. He revealed it on Emily Henderson’s blog right around the time we were ordering ours, so it helped us lock in our decision to do butcher block counters (we actually switched our plan last minute to get the exact ones that he chose – these from Ikea). We even ordered extra butcher block so we can make our floating shelves from the same stuff.

(source)

People have mixed feeling about butcher block in a rental, but we like that it’s affordable (like 10 times more affordable than some other options) and we LOVE that we can sand and refinish any major beatings that it might take (can’t say that if someone cracks/scratches/stains an expensive stone slab). We’ve actually heard a ton of helpful info from those of you with butcher block counters about how to seal them / treat them so they look good and last, so we’ll definitely be sharing all of that once they’re in (and we’ll be honest about how they hold up too – so stay tuned for photos and stuff as they get used and abused).

Orlando’s kitchen was also reassuring because he used the exact fridge we were considering. We don’t have space for a large fridge and we worried this one might look cheap, but – phew! – it looks great.

All of these decisions were made back in April, and we happened to lock everything in right as Ikea was having their semi-annual Kitchen Event Sale (more on that in podcast episode #52). The total (for cabinets and counters) would’ve been about $3200 – but we got 20% off our entire order thanks to the sale. Which saved us about $600 and brought the total closer to $2,600. That even includes the sink, soft close drawers/doors, and a pull-out trash can!

But even with most of the big items ordered, we still had lighting to figure out. Our first challenge was actual brightness, because I, John Petersik, am a lighting over-thinker to the Nth degree. First, we nixed the idea of adding recessed can lighting because we worried it would feel too “new” for the look we wanted in this 100 year old house. We have a few recessed lights elsewhere, so we’re not totally against them for the house, but the kitchen/dining room ceiling is SUCH a large plane, we wanted to avoid having a bunch of glowing circles dotting those pretty extra-high ceilings.

In the past we’ve relied on recessed lights to provide most of the functional lighting in our own kitchens, with pendants providing task and accent lighting. But in the beach house, our kitchen lighting – two island pendants and three sconces (along with two lights over the dining table nearby) – would need to do it all. So we quickly realized we needed to nix anything with a solid shade, so that every bulb could cast light in all directions instead of just shining it down. For instance, anything like the ones in our house’s kitchen were immediately out of the running. Sorry, guys.

Even with that no-shades rule helping us narrow things down, we still had a ton of lights that we were considering. So I mocked up this graphic to get a better sense of how our options looked with the rest of the kitchen. This was a failed option we were just playing around with at first (note the solid shades on both the sconces and pendants) but it was a huge help to see things this way. The subway backsplash isn’t for sure either, just a nice simple choice that lets us focus on what lights could work best:

We considered a few multi-light pendants, but most of them got eliminated for being the wrong style (these felt too modern) or so large that they dwarfed the island (or broke the bank).

A lot of the lights we typically would choose in a heartbeat (like these guys from Ballard Designs) felt too traditional for the vibe we were going for once we saw them in the mockup. Much of that had to do with the pink stove I think. It’s really cool and old and fun, but it might not lend itself to anything too formal.

The other thing we started bumping up against was scale. For instance, we started to think these beauties were the answer to all of our problems: glass shades, vintage look, right finish…

…but I was alarmed by 6″ measurement in its description (and that was the LARGER option they offered). My rendering above wasn’t to scale, so I started making a new version that was a bit more representative of size – particularly of the light in proportion to the eight foot island. That shed A LOT of light on the situation (pun completely intended). These were definitely too small.

I’ll cut to the chase. We ended up with this, as you saw in the original mood board up top. The pendants are 15″ wide and the clear shades allow them to throw light in every direction. Oh how I wish they were still on the Internet to link to them for you (they’re even prettier in person than in photos) but they seem to be out of stock everywhere. They were Trent Austin from Wayfair, so cross your fingers they come back someday.

We love how large the glass shades are without feeling heavy. The room instantly feels a lot closer to “done” with them hung, like they’re just begging for an island to be there. And the rest of the cabinets. And the appliances.

The sconces have shades that are wire mesh, so the light passes through them just like we wanted. We actually saw them in a showhouse shortly after ordering them and they looked GREAT all lit up. You can see how they’re not solid a bit better in this shot (there’s one more across the room too, which you can see in the second picture in this post).

Okay and one last mock-up. We also did this one that included plans for the adjacent dining area, just to try to picture how that would work with everything going on in the kitchen. Of course it has a pair of capiz pendants, because it wouldn’t be a beach house without Sherry’s favorite material of all time.

We opted for two lights over the dining table so that from the couch in the living room, the kitchen lights wouldn’t intersect at an odd place (once centered fixture would have). We also thought it would be fun to try two smaller pendants instead of one large chandelier. They don’t look great in the shot above because they’re hung higher than they’ll eventually go (and there’s no table under them to ground them). Oh yeah and the capiz is all still wrapped in its plastic shipping. Mummified capiz is the new black.

So that’s where we are. We’re headed out there soon to finish restoring the tub upstairs and to see how a few last floor repairs went upstairs. There are just a few tiny things on the to-do list (like finishing a railing for the back stairs) and then floor sanding and sealing can begin! After that, we can finally get started on making this kitchen come to life… and finally get those Ikea boxes out of our garage, which I’m also pretty stoked about.

Psst- You can read all about our past progress at the beach house by clicking into Our Beach House category. 

*This post contains affiliate links

The post How We Planned The Beach House Kitchen appeared first on Young House Love.