When we started our kitchen renovation, we thought it would easy. We were wrong. On a scale of one to ten, kitchens get the following score:

DIFFICULTY = 8
TIME CONSUMPTION = 10
LESSON IN PATIENCE = 9
COST = 7

It was our first major house challenge and many moons later – it is still not finished. I will do a post of our pre-reno kitch some other day. Today we talk about my hood. No, not the metro-Atlanta area and all it’s urban glory. Shoutout A-Town! I wanna talk about the Arietta 30in Venito Chimney Pyramid Ventilation Hood from Home Depot. I have been drooling over this baby since day 1. Note: we started the kitchen reno the week we bought the house – almost two years ago! And to this very day we still have no ventilation system in place for our stove, unless you count opening two doors and a window while I wave an empty pizza box at the invisible fumes. So you can understand my surprise, joy, shock, and increasing salivatory gland activity when I saw this from my boyfriend:

I love how he stuck a bow on it 🙂

And since we have nothing else to do (insert laughter here!) we thought we might as well install the sucker. Unfortunately, Jeremy found that no studs were available for mounting. Being my own personal handyman, he opened up the drywall to add some 2×4 pieces so that the back of the hood can be screwed securely above the stove and not fall into my skillet.

Side note – with a hood in place, I will be able to cook things like bacon…which I am very excited about. Before, pretty much all meats or stirfry or basically anything that produced a smell had to be cooked outside…on the grill…in the cold. My boyfriend has a ridiculously strong sniffer. If I made bacon, he would try to cover the odor with a generous dose of Febreze. Believe me, Blossoms & Breeze and pork do not mix.
After he ran the wires, I fixed the drywall with a quick coat of mud. Tonight I can do one more coat of joint compound and we should be ready for the backsplash! YEA!

And on a sidenote, we got the hood on sale with free shipping so it ended up costing a whole lot less than the Kenmore version that we were looking at getting. On the downside, we have all Kenmore appliances EXCEPT the hood – and it would have been nice to have all matching brands (for resale value). BUT on the upside, we got loads of more goodies with the cheaper-but-better Arietta. What goodies?

• 400CFM 3 speed blower (compare to Kenmore’s 270 CFM)

interpretation: more suck for your buck

• Filter Saturation Alarm that says clean/replace the filters

interpretation: your hood will stay good

• Temperature Sensor that adjusts to cooktop underneath it

interpretation: less boiling over the pot that boiled over

• Ductless kit is optional and available for purchase

And all that makes me (and the boyfriend’s olfactory sensory neurons) very happy.