yeah, pkponder, only 17. She just graduated HS a full year early, as valedectorian on May 24th. We're pretty proud of her. And, yes, the trips are always great fun since we're lucky enough to live close enough to such great places. Jekyll Island is my favorite place in the world! A natural preserve without all the tourists, an ocean, and enough photography subjects to keep my daughter wearing out batteries. And, the Great Smokys!!!! What beauty. Her favorite subjects are flowers and waterfalls, so we hike to some great places together. catherinet, none of these pictures were with a tripod, though she will use one occasionally. She prefers to hold the camera, though. I forgot to take your picture today before it started raining. If I can get some tomorrow, I will. She loves art - painting, drawing, photography - and she's very good at it. I'm encouraging her to follow her love of the subject into college, but some of the family has her concerned she can't make a living with art. She's going to go to college without deciding a major right now, which I think is smart. Hopefully, it will give me time to convince her she's that good.

Heres my thinking, FWIW. Anything you do - including a slavish reproduction of what you THINK is 1920s style is going to be your 2013 interpretation. The schoolhouse light is a ubiquitous vintage detail applied now to many different styles of houses and periods (and yes, I do think it would look great - there are some with bands of color on them that look very evocative of 20s-30s), but I dont think they were really all that common back in the day. Even selecting vintage fixtures - I do like your ebay find and think it would look great in the house, but authentic - nope .As someone else said, originally in this type of house it would have been a lightbulb hanging by a wire or in a ceramic light socket. My approach is basically to tune into the style/esthetic of early 1900s and then go from there, using some vintage pieces and some modern. Using this approach, even track lighting could work - there are some that have a kind of a spare, utilitarian/industrial type of look (with nickel finish). Sorta what a 1920s track light WOULD HAVE looked like - had it existed in some parallel universe somewhere. Well, I think you might be doing something more cottagey and softer than my "industrial farmhouse," but I just said that to illustrate the point that you do have some lattitude when thinking of "what fits" esp. with things easily changed like a light fixture. Structural things with houses I'd keep more intact and original. BTW, I have this great art deco ceramic light socket with pull chain in my hallway that I put a vintage repro lightbulb in and I just LOVE IT. Thinking of doing something similar (or some other type of bare bulb fixture) for my modest vintage "industrial farmhouse" kitchen, and then have task lighting under cabinets/over sink - thats where you need it - you dont need the ceiling lit up with a gazillion can lights.. Those repro bulbs are great - they last forever and put out a beautiful amber light. Well see if it goes as long as the original Edison lightbulb that is still burning in the Smithsonian!

This topic stressed me out a bit since we are the middle of work opening our kitchen to the dining room in our 1906 house. I'm already worried about whether everything will turn out ok. We thought a lot about this, though, so I'll weigh in. I apologize for the length - brevity may be the soul of wit, but it apparently is not my strong suit. We moved to our current 1906 Arts & Crafts house from a Victorian farmhouse which had the kitchen isolated from the dining room and living room, separated by a bathroom. We found it hard when we had people over since they were either crammed in the kitchen without enough room to participate in the cooking or they were way at the other end of the house. We saw that we had a pattern of having people over in the summer when we could congregate outside by the grill, but not much in the winter. We have a very close community of friends and we enjoy sharing meals in a very casual, family sort of way with kids playing, adults talking and cooking. We also found the dining room more difficult to use for everyday meals. Additionally, it was not possible to carry on conversations when in the two spaces or moving between them for setting, clearing etc. I enjoy cooking, but also like interacting rather than being isolated. When we decided to move we were looking to resolve this split and have a more connected common space. We saw many houses (and almost bought one) with family room additions connected to the kitchen which left unused living and dining rooms. These rooms had become merely somewhere to walk through, heat and cool. Some had little or no furniture in the abandoned formal rooms. We realized that we did not really need this redundant space. There is an excellent book by Sarah Susanka (Taunton Press), The Not So Big House. It talks quite eloquently about using space in an efficient manner. I personally like having one place to eat all meals. I like eating at the dining room table for just the reasons mentioned in posts above - slowing down, sitting on a chair instead of stools, in a space designed for eating, around a table (preferably round) which facilitates a relaxed, shared experience. The truth is that since we do not have servants, we often need to go back and forth between the spaces. Houses at the turn of the last century were often built to fit a more formal way of living which placed servants (even modest homes) or the women of the house out of the way while the hosts entertained in formal rooms. They were also built prior to the use of refrigerators. When we moved into this new-to-us 1906 house it had a (tiny) butler's pantry for staging serving, while the refrigerator was crammed into the food pantry in such a way that required near-contortionist moves to get a carton of milk. The only storage was open to mice or around the corner in the butler's pantry cabinet. Counter space was limited to the two drainboards of the 1950's metal sink. This was not the room of efficient post-work cooking and cleaning, much less any pleasant shared time. One of us would quite frequently get trapped in the pantry by another trying to get something. The rest of the first floor of our beloved home showed signs of the revolutionary changes that were happening in houses at the time, shifting from formal double parlors to more flowing open rooms with wide framed openings between them. I am in Oak Park, home to Frank Lloyd Wright, though our home was part of a far more modest working class development. It is stunning to see the differences among the different houses being built during the first part of the century. As central heating and radiators allowed rooms to open up, a social shift away from formality and toward more relaxed, real connection was also under way. Now that the social and technological changes that have transpired over the last century have ushered in a time of shared cooking, I welcome kitchens and floorplans that facilitate that. There are other times in history and other cultures today in which the communal kitchen holds a significant place in a community. Our new kitchen provides inward facing space where people can prep around an island. In our open floor plan I envision friends and family cooking and talking together, either within the de-cramped kitchen or between it and the dining room next to it. We are also concerned about creating something that respects the house's history, fits in with the architecture and creates a sense of two spaces with different but related activities. The disfunctional pantries were ommitted in favor of refrigeration and dish storage near the new dishwasher (uses less water than hand washing). We removed the wall between the kitchen and the dining room and are replacing a portion of it with shallow (12 inch)cabinets that create a partial division and open to both sides. There will be a 6 foot visual opening on top,stepping in to a 3 foot walking space at the bottom in a sort of key hole shape. As much as we love the big pocket door in the large opening between the dining room and the foyer, I doubt that we will use it. I just can't see part of our family sitting in the living room smoking cigars while another part of the family or servants quietly set the table out of sight. It has been a delicate dance trying to mesh the eras. We are having a duplicate of the missing original built-in hutch along one side of the dining room built, but it will have some wood doors in place of the original glass to house some less aesthetic items that have no other storage on the first floor since the one closet was turned into a WC in the 50's. We got a picture of the original at an open house across the street and noticed gloves and scarves displayed where china and silver of another time once shone. Life is not static and it seems to me that a key component to navigating the ever-shifting impermanence is to be flexible. I cross my fingers hoping that my ideas about homes and people actually work out in this re-working of our lovely old house. I do not disagree with any of the prior posts, I just wanted to add some thoughts.

As far as Caesarstone goes, don't believe all the claims. I put their "Raven" color in a kitchen in a vacation house (used mostly in the summer) 2 years ago and it has already chipped around the sink AND on the surface. Not sure how that happened. Also under the drainboard it has water marks that I haven't been able to get out. I tried bleach, comet, soft scrub, acetone, nothing works. When I contacted Caesarstone, they said soft scrub with bleach, but even that did not work. I've given up and will live with it, but if I had known that it wasn't as "bulletproof" as everyone claims, I might have gone with a different countertop.