This picture shows the little cabinet by the window which we will use as a pass-through for eating in the courtyard.

You also can see the lowered section of the counter for on the left. I put that in so it would be easier to roll out pie crusts, but it is a lot narrower in real life than I expected. We should have made it wider and would have solved our granite seam problem at the same time.

The pass-through cupboard itself, will be used to store produce and bread. Some things do much better if kept in a cool, dark place rather than in the refrigerator which—even with fancy produce drawers—dehydrates everything.

This cupboard has a vent to the outside and will act somewhat like an old fashioned root cellar. My mother lived in an apartment where there was an arrangement like this and liked it so much, she went on to install one in her house when she moved. My main concern is making sure that this cupboard doesn’t leak cold air into the house during the winter. We will have to work out some way of weather-proofing it a bit.

I had always planned to stencil a wainscot-high design around the walls of the master bedroom. I was strongly influenced in this by a coffee table book about houses in the Yucatan. This book also informed a lot of the scale of the rooms, since I showed it to Todd early on in the design process and he was equally enamored of it.

I looked and looked for a good design motif for my stencil and finally just traced one from a photograph in the book. Now, I need to get a stencil cut and for that I need to figure out the exact scale of the design. I printed out 3 sizes and brought them up and stuck them on the wall. This is the one I liked. I will make a larger printed-out section, just to be sure, before I get the stencil cut.