We started working on the kitchen back on February 10th. It all started with a family friend and contractor coming over to our house and tearing out the wall that separated the kitchen and dining room. That required a beam to be put in (as it was a load bearing wall), moving our fridge, rewiring some electrical outlets, and relocating the fridge plumbing. He also moved a section of cabinets and installed two new cabinets. Ripping out the cabinets created a big hole in our ceiling which meant that our whole ceiling would need to be stripped of popcorn and refinished (because a 30 year old ceiling won't match a new one)... the chain of events seemed endless but he wrapped up his portion of the work in just over a week.
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| View from the dining room before the wall was down. |
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| The view from the kitchen before the wall was removed. |
Once he wrapped up that meant the ball was in our court. We had great ambitions for an expedient finish to the project but having two under two, full time jobs, Bonnie in grad school, and various other things forced us to be a little more flexible with our timetable
Here is what we have accomplished so far:
- Paint the ceiling white (after it was redone)
- Painted the cabinet boxes white
- Replaced baseboards
- Installed crown molding
- Painted existing window trim and door frames white
- Painted the walls
- Refitting old cabinet doors to the new cabinets (thanks to some help from the shop teacher at school)
- Spray painted the dining room light fixture (from gold to black)
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| View from the dining room |
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| View from the other side of the dining room |
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| View from the kitchen. We love all the natural light we get now! |
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| A shot of the baseboard and quarter round that we installed this past weekend. |
We have gotten a ton done and the to do list is finally starting to feel like it is getting shorter.
We still need to:
- Touch-up baseboards and crown molding (you really learn how not square your house is when you install these things, see below)
- Replace counter tops (not planned, a major unforeseen expense) which happens Friday!
- Paint the cabinet doors
- Install new back splash
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| We will figure something out here. A little wood filler and caulk may go a long way. |
At times I (Tom) have not handled the stress of the remodel very well. I really struggle with losing time with my family to work solo on projects like this. Bonnie has helped a lot but grad school and the boys have kept her really busy too. I don't like putting a burden on her and I have minimal experience working with stuff like this so there is always a degree of stress that accompanies the unknown of a project. I'm really glad that we have under taken the project though. The progress already looks great and we are excited to see the finished project (whenever that manages to get done)!
1 comment:
Good morning, how are you?
My name is Emilio, I am a Spanish boy and I live in a town near to Madrid. I am a very interested person in knowing things so different as the culture, the way of life of the inhabitants of our planet, the fauna, the flora, and the landscapes of all the countries of the world etc. in summary, I am a person that enjoys traveling, learning and respecting people's diversity from all over the world.
I would love to travel and meet in person all the aspects above mentioned, but unfortunately as this is very expensive and my purchasing power is quite small, so I devised a way to travel with the imagination in every corner of our planet. A few years ago I started a collection of used stamps because trough them, you can see pictures about fauna, flora, monuments, landscapes etc. from all the countries. As every day is more and more difficult to get stamps, some years ago I started a new collection in order to get traditional letters addressed to me in which my goal was to get at least 1 letter from each country in the world. This modest goal is feasible to reach in the most part of countries, but unfortunately, it is impossible to achieve in other various territories for several reasons, either because they are very small countries with very few population, either because they are countries at war, either because they are countries with extreme poverty or because for whatever reason the postal system is not functioning properly.
For all this, I would ask you one small favor:
Would you be so kind as to send me a letter by traditional mail from Korea? I understand perfectly that you think that your blog is not the appropriate place to ask this, and even, is very probably that you ignore my letter, but I would call your attention to the difficulty involved in getting a letter from that country, and also I don’t know anyone neither where to write in Korea in order to increase my collection. a letter for me is like a little souvenir, like if I have had visited that territory with my imagination and at same time, the arrival of the letters from a country is a sign of peace and normality and an original way to promote a country in the world. My postal address is the following one:
Emilio Fernandez Esteban
Avenida Juan de la Cierva, 44
28902 Getafe (Madrid)
Spain
If you wish, you can visit my blog www.cartasenmibuzon.blogspot.com where you can see the pictures of all the letters that I have received from whole World.
Finally, I would like to thank the attention given to this letter, and whether you can help me or not, I send my best wishes for peace, health and happiness for you, your family and all your dear beings.
Yours Sincerely
Emilio Fernandez
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