Countertops Are In!

Once upon a time we started remodeling our kitchen. In January. I think. Early this year, at any rate. Months and months later, I have an actual kitchen. Like, a real one, with working appliances and real countertops instead of plywood and everything except a floor...we'll get there.

Anyway, without further ado, I present to you the (almost) final kitchen pictures:

First up, we have a detail that we didn't pressure ourselves to finish until we'd had a good, long rest. It turns out, putting in a whole kitchen worth of cabinets wears you out and then you want to spend the next few weekends vegging on the couch, crocheting a blanket while you watch BSG, even though your wonderful husband did most of the work. SO, we left the crown moulding until later, but it looks awesome and gorgeous, and calculating the correct angles at which to cut the pieces was awful. But it looks awesome:

Next up is a picture of the right side of my new kitchen, with the countertops installed and things placed strategically around the kitchen (microwave, blender, etc.):

And the left side:

Brand new kitchen and I've already got a mess going on the counter. Fabulous.

One of the best parts of getting acrylic countertops is the fully integrated sink, a.k.a. NO SEAMS FOR GUNK TO BUILD UP IN. That means less cleaning, and we all know I'm not really into cleaning.

Another view of the left side, right after the countertops were installed, before the mess began:

And, one of my very favorite details:

Shiny new stainless steel faucet. It will eventually match our appliances.

They will all be stainless steel, and all the handles will match all the handles on the cabinets. This is very important. Because we love it when things match!

But first we need a floor.

All in good time.

We're Almost There!

When we had our cabinets delivered we stashed them in the garage, but the night before we wanted to start on them we pulled them all upstairs and they completely filled my living room so I couldn't get to anything, and for a little while we had Buster trapped in the corner (don't worry, we let him out eventually...ha). 

The first order of business was getting the upper cabinets on the walls. First up we had to fasten them together, so we put two or three together on the floor before we got them up onto the wall.

You have no idea how hard it is to get these things up properly. They have to be perfectly level and corners and sides have to line up perfectly or else it won't work. One trick Scott had for making them level was to build a ledger underneath where all the upper cabinets would be. We made the ledger perfectly level, and that made it WAY easier to hold the cabinets level while they were being screwed into the wall.

We had a bit of a problem when we went to put in the solitary cabinet by the window. I wanted an equal amount of wall space between the window and the cabinets on each side, but I also wanted the very end of the upper and lower cabinets to align vertically. That didn't add up, however, so I had to make the very difficult decision to have the ends align instead of equal space around the window.

Ugh.

So here we are with the large section of upper cabinets installed (sans doors). At this point it started to look like it might actually turn into a kitchen at some point.

After we got all the upper cabinets in we started on the lower cabinets. We started in the corner by the window. It took a long time to get it level and such because our floor is not level and our walls are not straight. But, we got there.

Next up was the sink base. This one was tricksy. It seemed that no matter how we arranged the shims it just wouldn't work. We worked on this for TWO HOURS. Two. Finally Scott and I were getting really really frustrated and we were starting to get snappy with each other and we decided we should take a break and go get snacks at Maverik. Scott and I went and left Mim at the house, and by the time we got back she had magically shimmed it HERSELF. In ten freaking minutes. Anyway, it was a victory.

Then we decided to double check our measurements before we moved on. Um. We were like 1.5" off...and the sink base was off center under the window. Thank you Home Depot, for giving us incomplete plans. There was supposed to be a spacer between the corner cabinet and the sink base...so we had to cut a spacer, take the whole sink base out, and start again. It was...disheartening. Fortunately, after that the rest of the cabinets were a cinch.

After a long, LONG day, we got to the point where we could finish by ourselves, so Mim went home. I wanted to just quit for the night, but Scott thought that he might be in too much pain the next day (stupid back spasms) to get much done, so he wanted to do as much that night as possible.

Here is Scott, expressing how tired he was at this point. He will probably be mad that I posted this picture of him. That's too bad. It's funny.

So Scott started putting doors on the cabinets, while I put shelves inside them (and took pictures, obviously).

Just look at that gorgeous cherry color!

The next day we put hardware on, and that's about all we can do until our countertops get installed. So here's the (semi-) finished kitchen:

The appliances, eventually, will be stainless steel, but that's a long way in the future. We need to get a floor put in first!

The countertop dude came this past Friday and made a template for the countertops, and they will be delivered and installed this coming Friday. I'm really excited to spend that weekend organizing and cleaning up my kitchen!

Silly, Foggy Scott!

If you're going to buy an industrial strength fog machine, you should definitely get to play with it.

Awesome Halloween!

I don't think I need words to introduce this:



It would have been totally epic if we had had more than 15 trick or treaters...stupid Halloween on a Sunday.

At Least It's Progress!

So we have, for a few weeks, been working on our Halloween prep. As you know, Halloween is our favorite holiday and really, the only one we do much for (at Christmas I do put up a tree and some icicle lights over the garage, but that's about it).

Last year we had a few tombstones in our front yard and a fog machine blowing fog over them. Unfortunately, it was just one of those cheap 400 watt fog machines (only about 1500 cubic feet per minute or cfu), and the tiniest breeze would come along and it would all just blow away. Boring.

So this year we decided to try something more. When the fog comes out of the machine it is pretty warm so it floats upward automatically. If you want it to creep along the ground, it needs to be cooled. There are fog machines with built-in coolers, but they're way more expensive, so we decided to go to Home Depot (surprise, surprise) and make one ourselves. First up we got a bin (black so it wouldn't show well at night) and some dryer ducting, and coiled the ducting up inside the bin.



Then we cut a hole on the left side and the front side (look at the picture below) and attached the ducting with duct tape. Then the fogger went into one end and the fog came out the other side.



Then, we took an irrigation tube and attached that to the "out" end of the ducting.



When the fogger was hooked up, the fog came out all the little holes in the irrigation tube and, theoretically, would spread out all over the graveyard and not just in one direction.




We took it outside to give it a little test run. Into the bin we put ice (about four bags, I think):




We made sure all the ducting was completely covered:



Then we got everything assembled and let it cool for a while before we turned it on:




We turned it on and we were so excited to see it work...and it barely seeped out over the grass. There just wasn't enough fog coming out of the holes in the irrigation tube. I took a picture but Blogger just deleted it and I'm at work so I don't have a copy. Sad. Anyway, let's just say it wasn't exactly awe-inspiring.
We tried to rectify the situation by widening the holes, and that actually helped quite a bit, but it still wasn't that much fog, so we had to brainstorm. The nice thing was that the chilling mechanism was actually working great; the fog was staying low to the ground

So we decided to buy a more powerful fogger. Two, actually: one for each end of our brilliant apparatus (the other end of the irrigation tube was easy to open up) (we had capped it). So I went around town and looked for a 700 watt machine, which is the next step up. Last year Target had them, but this year they didn't. I went to Wal-Mart, Shopko, K-Mart, and even the Halloween Spirit store in the mall, but no luck. So I got online and started looking. I found several sites that had them for about $40, but the shipping was RIDICULOUS. Like, as expensive as the machines themselves kind of ridiculous. So, I was just going to give up when my dear Scott convinced me that since Halloween was our favorite holiday, and we keep good care of our stuff, and it would last for years and years, we should just buy one really freaking awesome fog machine and use it. So I got online, and Best Buy had a fogger that is 1200 watts (!), and the output was 7000 cfm (four times as much as our little baby foggers) and it was $150 with free shipping (but only $6 if we wanted it rushed) (and of course we did) (it'll be here by tomorrow at the latest).
Tune in next time (or maybe the time after that; I have other things to post about) for a story about how we built a coffin in our front yard!

Three Layers? Really?!

These pictures are somewhat out of order. Just a few more little things about our ongoing kitchen renovation.

When we pulled up the linoleum to replace that section of subfloor a few weeks ago, we had found a bit of water damage. In order to make sure we didn't have any water damage anywhere else in the kitchen, we pulled up the rest of the linoleum and took a peek behind and under cabinets and appliances.

We found this:



It looks pretty bad, yes?
Well, it wasn't! It turned out to be just a surface stain, so we didn't have to replace any more subfloor. I call that a win!
When we pulled out the hood over the stove we were surprised to find it wired into the wall instead of plugged into an outlet, but the most surprising part was that instead of cutting a nice hole in the drywall, they had just knocked a little hole in the wall and yanked the wires out:



We continue to realize that our house was built by Special People.
Here's Scott attaching corner bead (I told you these were out of order...):



And here's the back door, looking more and more like a door instead of just a hole in the house where we stuffed a door. This has since been mudded over and the boys are, in fact, almost done so I can jump in and start painting:





And a picture of the pulling up of the linoleum:





They had put a new layer of linoleum over the old one, and in a few places we actually found a third layer of linoleum... Oh well, it's all gone now. We just have subfloor now, so we pulled a few carpet scraps we had lying around in the basement and spread them over the kitchen floor so we wouldn't be walking on bare wood.
Oh, and P.S. We ordered the countertops, and we were lucky that we went in when we did because they had a special: free edging upgrade, so we saved about $500!

Sunday Spackling!

So Sunday (October 3)we picked up where we left off. The floor was done (where we needed it to be; we still need to pull up the rest of the linoleum but that can wait) so we needed to build the new half-wall, do the electrical wiring, drywall, and mud.

Our kitchen was already messy just from moving things out of the way so we could pull sub floor up, but it was only going to get messier.

We needed to pull out some of the cabinets so we could patch some holes in the drywall and move electrical outlets.

Here's the beginning of the new wall (which, funnily enough, ended up only a few inches from where the old wall was...) (but we still would have had to demo the old wall anyway to get it to the right height and get the electrical stuff in the right places).

Scott did all the wiring himself, saving us hundreds of dollars compared to having an electrician do it. Scott never ceases to amaze me with the amount of things he can do around the house!

We started drywalling over the old back door:

Screwing dry wall on to the new wall:

The ceremonial last piece of drywall (well, on the new wall, anyway):

Putting on the first layer of mud:

Here's the end product (well, not really end, but the end for Sunday):

We got a ton more done on Sunday than we did on Saturday. Saturday everything just seemed to get messed up a bit here and there, and it made everything SO. SLOW. But Sunday we had only planned on building the wall and getting the electrical outlets wired. We didn't plan to get drywall and mud done, but we did and it is starting to look AMAZING!

My kitchen is going to be fabulous.

Subfloor Saturday!

This past weekend we got a lot of work done in the kitchen in preparation for the new cabinets that will arrive next month. Now you get to see the pictures!


This is the section of floor where the pantry closet used to be.



There was an air return in the other side of the wall behind it, and there are several holes where electrical wires had been threaded. When we put the new flooring down we are going to need as perfect a sub floor as we can get, so we decided to replace a section of it. It's a good thing, too, because there was a bit of water damage we didn't even know about!


The first step was to rip up the old linoleum (yuck!) and what do you know, there was more, even uglier linoleum underneath it!



After that we started pulling up sub floor. When we're ripping the guts out of this house, we always come across something weird the builders did that makes us think they didn't get it inspected...here's Scott, with an incredulous look on his face because OH LOOK, THEY USED PEGBOARD INSTEAD OF SUB FLOOR. Idiots.







Once we got the giant hole torn out of our floor (and Scott was being goofy and stuck his head up through from the basement), we were able to start putting in new sub floor.





Scott is enjoying a well-needed break




And, tada, the finished sub floor:




The end. Well, not really. But that's all we got done on Saturday.


And by we I mean Scott and Jon. I wasn't very useful most of the time.

Stress Relief

So... Friday was a really stressful end to a really stressful week. So, to blow off some steam my friend Jon and I went shooting. We went up Farmington canyon... it was LOTS of fun. Took us almost 40 mins to get to the top. When we got there we started shooting. I just unloaded a bunch from my Walther P22: it is fun to shoot and is very accurate for a pistol. I then shot my Ruger 10/22. The sight was a little messed up and I didn't have much of a shooting platform... (Tail Gate) so at about 100 feet I was missing a little. I will have to go again and bring a mat to go prone on. Then I busted out my 870 shotgun. I am a lot better shot with my shotgun than I was when I first got it. I hit all but 3 of the 20 clays I shot at when I normally would have only hit 3 of 20 before.

We have an on-call phone at my work... it is nicknamed the "Brick of Burden". We got a new one ... so ... naturally my first thought was to shoot the old one.  I took it with me up in the mountains. I broke it.

Cabinets!

Scott and I are totally ready for the next phase of our renovation. We've been paying off the deck and our new bed and we're finally ready to jump back in.

Saturday we decided to go in to Home Depot and design our kitchen cabinets. It took two and a half hours, but we chose what cabinets we wanted, colors, hardware, and set up plans. We got the total: more than $6,000. Ouch. But Home Depot has a price match guarantee, so we took the plans over to Lowe's to see if they could beat it. We were incredibly surprised to find that their quote came to almost $2000 less than Home Depot's!

We like Home Depot better than Lowe's, though.

So we took out the printed list of all the different cabinet pieces and their prices and brought it back to Home Depot, where they were happy to replace all their prices with Lowe's prices, saving us tons of cash. They were also having a sale on their custom cabinetry, so we got an extra $1000 off our order! Total, after taxes and delivery fees and all the little extras we got, we ended up paying only $4600, and they threw in the hardware for free.

We freaking LOVE Home Depot!

We'll have the cabinets delivered sometime at the end of October, and then we'll start ripping everything up in the kitchen. We'll be really careful with our current cabinets, since Mim wants them when we're done for her downstairs kitchen. They're so old and ugly, so she'll have to refinish them, so we're just going to give them to her for free. She also wants our appliances when we get new ones, but that will be a long time from now.

So we'll rip out the cabinets and move the appliances out of the way, then we need to finish up the drywall where the back door used to be (which means we'll need the inspector to come over sometime very soon) and build the little half-wall the peninsula will be up against. After that we can paint at least the part of the kitchen where the new stuff will be (it's a huge room, so there's really no need to paint it all at once) and then we'll need the countertops.

The countertops are going to end up being almost as expensive as the cabinets themselves, and it looks like Lowe's won't have lower prices to match on this one. They'll be a speckled Corian acrylic that goes SO WELL with the cabinets, flooring, and paint we've chosen. So until we get the cabinets delivered, we're going to have to scrimp a bit so we can afford to order the countertops soon after we get the cabinets put in.

Our kitchen will be gutted for a while. I'm going to have to figure out where to put all of our dishes and such while we don't have any functional cabinets.

After we finish all this, we're going to have to wait a while and make money for the next phase: flooring. Brazilian Cherry!

Pictures!

A few weeks ago Scott and I finally got around to buying a new bed. RC Willey was having an amazing sale, with a couple hundred dollars off plus a free headboard, a free sheet set, free pillows, and a free little HDTV:

Scott's been using it as a computer monitor (surprise, surprise). It actually died on him the other day, but when he brought it back in to the store they were happy to replace it so no harm done.

 So here's our beautiful, soft, comfy, BIG, king-sized bed:

Buster has been getting really good at holding treats on his nose until we say "ok".

When Scott gets sad (say, when we spend $4600...) he hugs Buster, even though Buster doesn't like being hugged:

We found a new mask for Scott to wear under his cloak when he passes out candy this Halloween:

Of course, we had to put it on Buster, who was not amused:

And that's it!

Sushi

There is a new sushi place near our house... we thought we would try it. Bad idea. I don't like sushi. I only had two pices but my tummie was all... "Um ... this is not cooked, I think I am going to kick you in the butt for this... ready... go ... (kick)" not fun. I thought it would be good. Wayne is always telling me that it is good so I blame him.

Shooting ... Paper

Anna, Jon, and I went shooting a few days ago. I am super rusty and need contacts. I can't see the target. I used to land almost all of my rounds in the same hole... or at least within an inch of each other. I had not shot anthing in almost 1.5 years... man that is way too long. My pictures turned out a little blurry ... but I will show you anyway. This is me shooting Jon's new CZ. Good gun ... I wish I could get one. The next one is Anna shooting her .380 for the first time.