We’ve had a couple of challenges in furnishing our village house in France (beyond the fact that we’re only there a few weeks out of the year). One of the biggest has been finding the French equivalents of West Elm, Restoration Hardware, or Pottery Barn.

Let’s just say that most of the furniture stores we have found have trended towards the ultra-modern (think purple sofas and shiny metal coffee table cubes) or french Provencal reproduction (which just looks generically wood and non-descript).

Neither of these options are even remotely our style, and googling “industrial/vintage reproduction furniture” and translations there-of have been less than successful. There were a lot of shops we really loved in the UK and Sweden, but not so much in France.

Our original plan was to mix and match more modern pieces from IKEA with antiques that we picked up from local Trocs (sort of consignment/antique shops where people can bring stuff in to sell) and over time, add accessories found at local markets.

Our last trip, we picked up a few mattresses (we have 3 bedrooms) and the Karlstad sofa from IKEA, but other than that, we still have a mostly empty house.

Since we have an open dining and kitchen area (see below), we particularly wanted to find an antique farm style table that would hold 6-8 people comfortably.

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Tennessee is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a hot bed of design.

I am always jealous of other bloggers who talk about finding awesome mid-century furniture for $20 on Craigslist. We also usually don’t have awesome flea market or antique store finds when it comes to furniture. So it’s particular hard to get a hold of a lot of the items that I would really really love to have, like this piece, from LA based REHAB:

If only shipping large items across the country wasn’t soooo expensive. Sigh.

The husband had taken two weeks off in May, for a trip over to our place in France. But we’ve been waiting a few months to have someone come in and fix our boiler (no hot water!) and since we weren’t 100% sure it would be fixed by the time vacation time rolled around, we held off on buying flights til the last possible moment.

Good thing we did. Let’s just say we’re still hot-waterless over the pond.

So there we were, two DIY-ers with a two week vacation and no place to go. Hmm, we thought, our kitchen is small, we could redo our kitchen in two weeks, right? Right?

You see, a kitchen renovation has been high on our list of major improvements to our house (right up there next to converting the upstairs Jack & Jill bathroom into two full baths).

We’ve only shown the picture before once or twice, but here’s what our kitchen looked like when we moved in, in all its glory:

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