I just have to share!

Pics of our 99.9% finished kitchen!

We worked hard all weekend and here's where we are at:

This weekend, we installed the over range microwave, my cute little wine glass rack, and all of the cabinet knobs and drawer pulls, AND did a lot of clean up work! I LOVE how it looks!

We still have to caulk around the counter/wall, and install a new faucet, which we have ready to go, and put one more switch plate on, and of course find a home for all the stuff that's still sitting on our kitchen table, but we are definitely almost there!

It has been a long road, but I'm so proud of the work we (and especially Mark!) have done to our kitchen!

Here is what it looked like before - bleck! -

My Week Thus Far.

Thank goodness we are heading towards the end of the week! I've been so busy at work, by the time I get home I just want to change out of my work clothes and collapse on the couch with a book, which is what usually happens.

We (meaning Mark) has made quite a bit of progress in the kitchen. It's looking very good. I consider myself to have helped at least a little bit. I may not have helped with the manual labor, but I am a good cheerleader ifIdosaysomyself! The walls are now all sanded down (Holy dust, Batman!) and primed. We are officially ready to paint! I'm so excited, I can't even tell you!

This weekend, we are planning to go to Home Depot to purchase our new faucet (must have, the old one is leaky and well... old), which I'm VERY excited about, and also our over range microwave. We got a coupon in the mail 10%, or was it 20%? Anyway, a coupon for a percentage off our total order at HD, so we're going to use it to purchase these two fairly expensive items.

We have decided that we are going to leave the countertops as is for now. They are outdated and do need to be changed out eventually, but since I can't really decide what I want right now, and the old ones look much better now that everything else has been updated, I think we'll live with them for a while and spend the money when we're really sure what we want to do.

I'm hoping that we can get this project finished up this weekend!

(P.S. I still haven't baked any bread. The dough is still waiting in the fridge, which is okay, but I have nothing to report yet.)

Weekend Recap.

Saturday was H's Fantasy Football draft day. Presumably, that went well. While he entertained himself with imaginary football teams, I went out to lunch with my friend Rachel. It was nice catching up. I then came back home and relaxed for another couple of hours by myself (well, with the dog and Kitteh running around as always).

Once H got home, we took a trip to 2 outlet stores to see if they had the couch that we had our eye on. They had similar styles, but not quite what we wanted, however we were able to verify that the sale price on the couch that we wanted was a good deal, and that the quality will be good. Once we got home, we ordered our new couch! I'm so excited to get this. I'm beginning to really dislike our current couch. Of course we have to wait like 5 weeks for the new one to get here, but it will be so worth it!

This is it:

We got it for 50% off, pretty good deal if I do say so myself.


Now, we are trying to decide on a chair.

H wants the matching leather chair.

I want a complementary fabric/upholstered chair. I don't like things to be super matchy-matchy and I'm also worried about having too much leather in a small space. H says there can never be too much leather.

Enter "Chair and a half". This may deserve it's own post, but I'm going to include it here.

This is the matching leather chair that H originally wanted:


It's a bit smaller than the chair that we currently have, but it looks comfy.

This is the complimentary chair that I want:
It's a beautiful shade of Olive which would look perfect in our family room.

Here is the corresponding "chair and a half" that I opened my big mouth about:
Same beautiful shade of Olive as the chair that I want, only larger. The problem is that we have a small family room. The "chair and a half", although comfy, I'm sure, is slightly larger than the bohemoth chair that we currently have in it's place. H is convinced that "chair and a half" will provide ultimate comfort to his booty. I think it might just be too large for our space, but I think my choice has come down to the matching leather chair, which I don't even know if H is that interested in anymore, or chair and a half.

H is still thinking about it. *sigh* We'll see.

Sunday I spent doing the usual housework chores and we FINALLY got the cabinet doors up. Here's something wonderful -> when we originally shopped for hinges, we found that Lowe's had the ones we need priced at $3 per hinge. We even looked at the package. Well, turns out that there are actually 2 hinges per package. They come in a set, it's just hard to see them both in the little baggie. It's actually $1.50 per hinge.

We only find this out AFTER we purchased hinges off eBay, which took FOREVER to get to our house, THEN ended up being the wrong design, so we ended up biting the bullet and deciding to pay $3 per hinge. It turned out to be 1/2 the price of what we were expecting, but still slightly more expensive than what we could have gotten them for on eBay IF we could have found the correct style, which we apparently failed at before. Now, I have to return the ones that we purchased and waited forever to receive instead of going right around the corner and picking up the hinges that actually ended up being the ones that we used.

Oh well. You win some, you lose some.

In other news, the kitchen looks fab! I love it! It looks completely different, much cleaner, newer, and more open! I can't wait to get the electrical taken care of so that we can get the walls finished!

I'll upload some pics ASAP!

Not Good.

We FINALLY received our cabinet hinges in the mail after waiting about 2 weeks for them. So glad that I paid $12 shipping on them.

We open up the box and... they are not what we need.

This does not please me.

Now we have to figure out what we are going to do now.

All I know is that we have to get the cabinet doors put back on. I can't stand tripping over them any longer!

Weekend Recap.

Friday evening, we went to an early movie. We saw Mirrors and it was really scary! I'm now convinced that there are people in the mirrors trying to get me, awesome. One thing that really shocked me and made me want to slap people is that they took their kids to the movie! This is an R-rated horror film, it had nudity, very harsh language and it was darn scary! Some lady sitting next to us, brought her kid who was like 5 years old. Totally inappropriate IMO. I know that I should expect it by now, but the irresponsibility of parents amazes me every time. God forbid you should restrict what your young child watches. Ugh!

Aside from that, once the movie was over, we got trapped in the aisle. Like I said, we went to an early movie, around 4.30PM, so the theatre was not full by any means. There were 2 girls sitting to the left of us, and the 2 women with the little kid sitting to the right. The credits start rolling and we get up to leave from the right side, and the people next to us just sat there, didn't even acknowledge that we were trying to leave. So we turned to the left... the people on the left were getting up and preparing to leave, or so it seemed to us. I have no idea what they were doing, but they were moving so slowly even though it was quite apparent that we were trying to escape the darn theatre. So, we turn to the right again, the people over there still weren't budging. I then turn around (we were sitting very close to the front) the ENTIRE theatre had already emptied out. Seriously. The ONLY people left in the theatre was us and the people who were trapping us.

Eventually we got out, of course the people all ended up getting up and leaving at the same time. I still have no idea what took so long, but H and I found it very funny that we ended up being the VERY last people out of the theatre. I think those people on either side of us were very rude. Everyone knows that movie theatre etiquette is to get up and get the Hell out of there! Or, if you're going to drey around and watch the credits, you need to move/stand up so that other people aren't trapped in the aisle.

After the movie, we went out for Mexican, then ran to Target for a couple of things for the house, then over to Wal-mart (always an... experience) to get some organizers for the kitchen cabinets and then home to relax.

Saturday we went down to Mark's Mom's house to visit. We took the puppy with us so that she could play with Mark's Mom's dog, who she just loves to death. They wore each other out as usual with all of their running around. We then went home to relax for the evening.

Sunday was so nice! I had all of the windows open and there was a nice breeze, very unusual for the dog days of summer in Ohio. I cleaned and did laundry as Sunday is my usual day for this and I also got quite a bit of reading done (I'm currently working on Breaking Dawn). I organized/rearranged some of the kitchen cabinets. We are trying to clear out some of the stuff that we don't need for the yard sale that we are planning to have very soon. I'm sure this will be another adventure. We are still waiting to get the hinges so that we can reattach the cabinet doors, I'm starting to get very impatient, but hopefully we will have them very soon.

And, Mark got me a pretty plant that I put in a pot. It's very cute.

And... We're Still Working on it.

The kitchen renovation that is.

We are currently rounding 3rd base and about to head home with this project. I think we need ONE MORE coat of paint on the cabinet doors, which will then be a total of 3 (+ 2 coats of primer) and we should be good to go!

Yesterday, we ordered new hinges, which are MUCH more expensive than they should be in my opinion! At local home improvement stores lower end hinges cost about $3 PER HINGE! We need 32 hinges total, which would have ended up costing about $100 for something you barely even see! Ick.

Thankfully, I was able to find what we needed online - I lub eBay - and we were able to purchase hinges in bulk (maybe I can resell the ones we don't need?) for a total of $55 including shipping! That's a savings of 45%! Yay us!

We also started looking around for drawer pulls and cabinet door knobs, which we will also end up purchasing online (most likely). They are just outrageous in home improvement stores.

I can't wait to see the cabinet doors back up. I really think it's going to look great!

Operation: Kitchen Renovation Update.

Uggggghhh!

We worked on the cabinets ALL weekend! Saturday, we spent all day applying two coats of primer. It doesn't sound like much work, but trust me, it was.

Sunday, we started applying color. We are using Antique White, and we are very careful to allow the paint to dry in between coats. We ended up getting two coats on the cabinets themselves, and one coat on the doors (because you have to wait for one side to dry before you can flip it over to do the other side).

I'm so sick of working on these, but I really think it will be worth it in the end. They are already looking amazing! I can't wait until we get finished and get the doors back up so that we can see the end result of all our hard work.

In all, we spent approximately 10-12 hours working on cabinets this weekend. Not the best weekend ever, but certainly productive.

Here are the cabinets at the beginning of the day on Sunday. They are all primed and ready for paint.

And the doors:

I told Mark that next time I get some crazy idea to rush into a huge project like this, it's his job to remind me of the cabinet project.

Operation: Kitchen Renovation. Oy.

Yesterday evening after H and I got home from work, we took down all of the cabinets, removed all of the hardware and then began the long task of stripping the cabinets of their current varnish. To those who have not yet had the glory of this experience, it's not a *difficult* task, it's just time consuming and a lot of hard work.

We weren't yet sure whether we were going to be restaining the wood cabinets or painting, we needed to see what the wood underneath the current stain looked like, so we brushed, and scraped, and sanded, and cleaned, and underneath the ugly orange-y tinted varnish... was orange-y wood, but that's okay. Now, we have decided that we won't be able to acheive the look that we want by staining over orange-y wood, so we are now just going to give them a fresh coat of white paint.

The good news is that we won't have to deal with stripping the remaining 10 cabinets, we can just give them a good rub down with sandpaper, clean them up, prime them properly, and then slap on some paint. This will actually save us some time because we can skip a step.

Here's a glimse of the chaos ensuing at our home right now:

Here is a before shot, you can see the hideous faux-brick (ick!) and the complimentary orange-y cabinets. Lovely pairing.

Here's a shot of the ridiculousness that we uncovered when we removed the faux-brick. If you can't tell, that's an exposed wire connecting to the outlet, which was so conveniently located up against 20 year old particle board. Awesome.

This is what my hubby's face looked like after we uncovered the exposed wire asshattery. He's not pleased.

This is after we got all of the brick down. I'd be happier looking at that ugly dirty yellow wall for the rest of my life, than the disgusting faux-brick that was up there. Literally.

And here's what the kitchen looks like right now with all of the cabinet doors removed. On the plus side, it looks like we have a lot of storage, and if you want something you can just walk up and take it without having to deal with the extra step of opening a pesky door first. ::thumbs up::

Life As We Knew It.

I just finished this novel yesterday evening, and WOW! Is it wonderful! This novel is classified as Young-adult Fiction, but it's definitely a thought provoker for readers of all ages!

Told through the journal entries of a 16 year old girl's diary, Susan Beth Pfeffer's Life As We Knew It is about the girl and her family's struggle to survive after a nearly apocalyptic event. As the world watches, a denser than expected asteroid strikes the Moon knocking it nearer to the Earth's surface and wreaking havoc on the weather systems. Preliminary reports are heard of tidal waves that completely decimate the coastal states and sink entire countries, hundreds of thousands Americans dead, even more across the world, tornadoes striking, volcanoes never known to exist continuously erupting, and mass panic everywhere.

The family moves quickly and stockpiles food, clothing, batteries and First Aid necessities while stores are still open, but once the electricity never comes on again, the phone lines are down, and there is no gas to be had, the family is alone from May through the winter where they struggle hard for survival. They don't know who from their extended family and friends are alive, but they must stick together and save themselves.

This book is very intense. I was about 50-75 pages in, when I got so scared by the panic that I had to stop reading for a few minutes. When I explained to my hubby that I was scared he just kind of rolled his eyes and told me to quit reading. I couldn't just stop! The story is told so vividly, and the situation is so believable that it really did scare me for a bit. This is a wonderful read!

Operation: Kitchen Remodel update:

We went shopping for counters yesterday evening and it's hard! I know that I want something neutral and light, but not TOO light, but definitely not something dark. The hard part is that they have counter tops in every shade of color imaginable! It makes my head spin and it's very hard to pick out something so important, or at least, that's how I feel! Oh well, we are planning to start stripping the cabinets this evening, we'll see how this long process goes.

Operation: Kitchen Remodel.

Operation: Kitchen Renovation is officially underway.

I was sitting at work yesterday afternoon, letting my mind wander all over the place as usual (always a dangerous thing) when I decided that there is nothing holding us back from starting the Kitchen Project. I decided right then that I wanted to rip out that Gawd-awful faux-brick paneling that was (maybe?) meant to be the backspash in the kitchen. The faux paneling went from the bottom of the cabinets to the counter, and then along a tiny little lip of wall that houses the refrigerator. I have hated the existence of this faux-brick since we first toured our house while looking to purchase.

First, I despise faux-anything. I think it's cheap and tacky, this includes all faux-brick, tile, paneling (which we also had some of, ick), and the list goes on. I just can't imagine a moment in time when a reasonably sane individual could walk into a home improvement store asking where the particle board, cheap, faux-brick is. The only conclusion I could come to for the reason that this hideous junk was applied to the walls in our house is that they were able to get it for a cheaper price than paint. I'm guessing it cost about $0.02 per square yard. If the brilliant people who put it up payed more than that they were severly ripped off in my honest opinion.

So, I just up and decided that after work, I was pulling that faux-brick down! I texted my hubby of my grandiose plans:

Me: i want 2 rip down the kitchen walls 2night
H: ? why tonight?
Me: Bc im so tired of looking at that icky brick!
H: Lol. i can start when i get home.
Me: I can do it myselfs! When r u going 2 b home?

We arrived home from work at about the same time, and I'm guessing that Mark probably assumed (conservatively so) that I had lost my motivation to begin this DIY home project, but I was ready to go!

We ended up spending yesterday evening prying, pulling, yanking, and tearing all of that icky faux-brick down! (except for a small area that we can't seem to get out, but it's off to the side.) I swear, even though we are down to bare walls, two different shades of yellow, with stains, cracks, and nail holes, it still is a huge improvement of the faux-brick that used to be there. Our kitchen looks larger already!

Our plans are to paint the walls, purchase and install new counter tops (yikes!), and refinish the existing cabinets (double yikes!!). This is our first major home project other than painting when we moved in, and landscaping last year. It's very exciting.

I have some pics from last night, but they are at home, I'll try to add them later.