The last part of our Kitchen Makeover Application was a video submission. Unfortunately video producing and editing is neither of our strong points. Maybe if I had someone other than my twelve year old daughter do the video-taping and if Carolyn had not been so busy planning her wonderful wedding, we could have created a better video…

And then here’s was the rejection letter I received from Angie Jedlicka of RIVR Media after submission…

Thank you so much for your submission to our new kitchen makeover television series.  We received hundreds of great entries and it was a very difficult task to sort through them all in search of our participants.   Unfortunately, you were not chosen for the program but we will keep your video and application on file for future shows.

We want to thank you for all the hard work you put into your submission and your interest in our show. We had some amazing videos come along and we can’t thank you enough for your participation and creativity.

I was so sad that we didn’t get chosen as I thought it would be super fun to work with Nicole Facciuto and hang with Carolyn in Chicago for a week! The new kitchen for Carolyn and being on an HGTV show would have just been a bonus.

P.S. Carolyn still promises she’ll cook pizza on the grill for me!

Imagine Carolyn’s and my utter excitement when I received the following email from RIVR Media…

Your submission has made it to the next step in our show’s casting process. In order to be considered, we need additional information about you and the person who you think deserves a kitchen makeover.

Again, we are a new television show looking for energetic and passionate people who are not shy about being on television. We believe both you and your nominee are excellent candidates for this show.

As part of the Kitchen Makeover Questionnaire, we each had to tell a bit about ourselves and our families, etc. Here is an excerpt from what we submitted:

Kim:
Born and bred in Nebraska. In high school, my dream was to live in a big city and produce television commercials (my original major in college was Art). That dream took a detour when I got pregnant, got married and had four children before I turned 25!  But I wouldn’t trade my kids for anything. I still think of myself as a big city girl stuck in a small town (population 1700).  I can see myself living in Chicago or New York City (these are my favorite cities for walking and public transportation as I don’t like to drive) when all the kids are grown and gone.

Being a young mother, I had to be frugal by cutting coupon and sending in rebates.  My hobby of saving money was paying for my husband’s (now-ex) hobby of flying airplanes.  Once I discovered the invention of the world wide web, I started a website to help other’s save money and in turn, that website now supports my family (and I let my ex-husband keep the airplane in our divorce).  I originally met Carolyn years ago at an internet marketing conference, and we’ve been friends ever since.

I am now dating a wonderful man that has even more kids than I do (we could have our own football team).  Plus he is the cook in the relationship.  If kitchen makeover applications were being accepted for the middle of nowhere in Nebraska, I may have nominated him instead.

Carolyn:
I’m originally from San Diego, but moved out to Chicago in 1995 to go to school (Northwestern University, also in Evanston, where I live now).  Everyone always asks, “You left San Diego for this?”  But seeing the seasons change is a lot of fun for me!  This last autumn was our first in Evanston, and it was absolutely incredible to see the leaves change color around our own home.  On Halloween, we raked the leaves into a huge pile on our front lawn, and were rewarded later in the evening when a trick-or-treater (it was the tiniest Harry Potter you’ve ever seen) took a giant flying leap right into the middle of the pile.  The exhilaration in his face was phenomenal!  That right there shows the warmth and friendliness of the Midwest spirit.

My fiancé Jeff (now husband) and I met over 10 years ago, while we both worked for the same company.  We were always really great work buddies, but lost touch for about five years when I went back to school to get my MBA.  Two years ago, he sends me a text message out of the blue, and we meet up for a couple drinks.  We’ve been together ever since.  And this August, we’ll be married!  (Want to come?  The ceremony is in Kauai, followed by a reception in Chicago, followed by a campout for anyone who wants to join at Sleeping Bear Dunes in Michigan!  I can’t promise you a nice kitchen while we’re camping, but I can promise you some good grub!)

Special talents…I love to write, so I freelance for the local newspaper and for a business magazine just to keep my pen nimble; I love to decorate cakes and I can make a pretty decent rose out of gum paste; I can trade knock knock jokes with the best of them; and I can get a meat and potatoes man to eat tofu.

Continue on to Kitchen Makeover Application: Finale

Carolyn & Kim posing as Ford spokeswomen BlogWorld - Las Vegas 2009

Here is an excerpt from our initial application submission:

Tell us why you are nominating this person. We want to hear about his/her love of cooking – favorite type of food to cook, favorite restaurants, favorite chefs – and what she/he doesn’t like about their current kitchen. The more personality/detail the better!

I am nominating Carolyn because she absolutely loves to cook and makes the most out of her cardboard kitchen. Her and her fiancé (note: now husband) just bought a beautiful Dutch Colonial home built in the 1920s. Great neighborhood, great school system, right across the street from the 11th hole of a golf course, wonderful little garden… The house is in great shape, but the kitchen could use some work. Old butcher block counter tops, not the kind with character, but the kind used when trying to skimp. White veneer cabinets, plywood molding around the doors and windows (hand-painted with little green leaves no less), and the piece de la resistance, a stained glass cabinet featuring large palm trees over the fridge. Oh but wait, that’s not stained glass, that’s stained plastic.

You know how they say “Everyone gathers in the kitchen”? Not this kitchen. It’s a sad kitchen for such a passionate foodie. She’s a farmer’s market kind of gal marrying a meat and potatoes guy, so household meals tend to stretch from a really delicate corn and fingerling potato chowder (her) to slow cooked ribs dry rubbed with a house concoction (him). She incorporates her Chinese background into her food, working wonders with tofu, and he brings his Finnish upbringing in the mix with homemade pastys. Her favorite chefs include Carrie Nahabedian of Naha in Chicago (you can see an interview Carolyn did with Carrie on her blog: Urban Vivant); Alice Waters; and Art Smith. His favorite chef, if you ask him, is probably her…but if you ask him privately, it would probably be whoever the line cook is at the closest Chipotle.

I think what both of them don’t like about their kitchen, is that it is very dated and closed off from the rest of the house. It’s not laid out right for both of them to be in the kitchen at once, which is really sad for a soon-to-be-married couple. There’s lots of room to bust down a wall, but they could really use some ingenuity and muscle to figure out how that would work. I would like to think that one day, they will have a kitchen that reflects their shared warmth and spirit. Please help me help them!

Continue on to Kitchen Makeover Application: Part Two

A house isn’t a home without family photographs, and I was excited to learn about Fracture – a new one-piece picture and frame made from printed glass that mounts directly to your wall quickly and easily.

Fracture lets you print your digital pictures right onto glass!  There’s no paper, film or anything involved.  Simply ink and glass. They have effectively combined printing, framing, and mounting into one simple process.  You upload your photo to FractureMe.com, they print it on shatter-proof glass (all sharp edges removed), and send to you with everything you need to mount and display.

I wrote this blog post in response to a TwitterMoms RAMBO alert, making me eligible to get a Fracture picture frame for review. If I am among the first 100 participants, I will be writing a follow-up post about Fracture with my feedback after testing it out! You can learn more about Fracture at http://www.fractureme.com.

And here is the result after I organized my “junk” into 12 (twelve) mini-storage bins that I got free-after-rebate from Menards…

One drawer down.  Two many to count to go…

Although mountain lions (also called cougars, pumas or panthers) were part of Nebraska’s native fauna, they were extirpated by the end of the 19th century (source). No confirmed sightings have been made in the state until the 1990′s.

Now this is where bar talk get interesting. Rumors say the police shot at the mountain lion, but it got away. Several residents did indeed hear a gun shot, but no cops have acknowledged firing the shot that I know of.

Many believe it’s a conspiracy theory that the government planted the mountain lions in Nebraska to help thin out the deer population. If that’s true, it hasn’t helped much because BF and I counted over 100 deer while on a short Sunday drive recently. Can’t they just extend deer hunting season to thin them out?

These transplanted cougars supposedly have tracking chips embedded in their ears so the government can track them via GPS.  So I asked, “How will they track their offspring if they reproduce?” Leave it to me to bring up a question involving sex. The answer I got was that they sterilized them. But The Trapper & Predator Caller Blog just today showed evidence of two mountain lion kittens that document mountain lions reproduction in Nebraska.

So that story isn’t as good as Pennsylvania’s Cougar Conspiracy, but after having a few drinks, it made for some good discussion. Many argued that it was probably just a bob cat or big tom cat. Some claim to have actually seen the footprints. I’m indifferent.

Photo Credit.

I love the floor plan!  And I’m glad that they decided on the third garage (so I don’t have to store his old Mustang in my third garage anymore)!

Here’s Wishing you and yours a very Merry Christmas and a Happy, Healthy NewYear from my family to yours!

Despite being snowed in, we had a wonderful Christmas. Santa must have known I’ve been a good girl this year.

Of course, I’m not even sure where I’d build a new house – I’d need to buy a lot first. I’m considering building outside the city limits, but there are pros and cons to that…

Pros: Less property taxes, More personal space, Own well so no water costs, Lower gas costs with own tank.

Cons: More upkeep, Farther from town to cart kids to activities and grab a soda when having a caffeine fit.

Such decisions. Time to start manifesting my dreams.
Other than that, Life is good today!

Well, my youngest daughter is complaining that she wants “a new room”. It isn’t good enough that she got a brand new bed (she still crawls in bed with me all the time, even though she’s eleven now).  She claims she hates pink {gasp}! I ask what color she wants to paint her room.  Her favorite color is orange.  Orange?!  I hate orange!

So I’m wondering why I hate the color orange so much.  Oh. My. Gawd. Could it be because my room growing up – that my mother decorated – was orange!? Am I turning into my mother?!

I’ve already decided that the next house I build, I promise to let the kids pick out their own colors for their rooms. Now, let’s just hope I get that house built before they are all grown and moved out!

Of course, on my goal list, ideally I would like to be married first before building again. Because let’s face it, no one takes a woman as serious as a man when it comes to picking out bricks and shingles.