It's beginning to look a lot like....a KITCHEN!!

I am so excited about this post.  This is the one room that has undergone the most change.. well, other than the walk in closet becoming a bedroom...

We started with a kitchen that looked like this the first time we saw it...

We actually had someone say out loud "why are you changing it?".. Well, for starters IT'S UGLY!! And then of course it was filthy and then nothing worked...not the oven, not the stove, not the dishwasher, not the microwave,  not the trash compactor and the sink wasn't even positioned under the window...so yea...now it looks like this...

opening the first box of cabinet...

ledger board to "rest" the upper cabinets

the directions say "start in the corner" so they did..

my fabulous brother-in-law who volunteered to use two days of his vacation to help..and then had to share his bed with the dog...

hubby left, BIL right.. cabinet number 2

yippee... microwave cabinet..

and that is the last upper on the right side of the kitchen..

lets' make sure it's level and straight and then have some lunch...

cause after lunch we start on the left side of the kitchen...this double cabinet is directly over the dishwasher and will be so nice to hold all the dishes we use on a daily basis..

and the last cabinet on the left side.

and so end the first day ...The sink base is installed, but the lower cabinet on the left is just sitting there for tomorrow and the drawer base to the right of sink is also just sitting there...  We all laid down and rested for awhile and then went out to dinner in town... I had a great hamburger, hubby had a rib eye and BIL had a rib eye sandwich...and a couple of beers...he deserved them.   Ok, for full disclosure I had one Bud-lite...and it was good..

 What did I do while they were installing cabinets?  I made lunch, handed them tools, got rid of all the big cardboard boxes. wired and put up light fixtures in one bedroom, two in a hallway, one in the entryway  and more..  BUT if you ask the hubby..he will say I played solitaire on my new iPad..lol

DAY 2 -

Hubby was up at 5:30am...old habits die hard.  BIL and I got up around 7am.. 

the drawer base is now installed, corner blind cabinet installed and now the last drawer base goes to the right..

this is where the stove will end up.  Lots of measuring and talking and leveling went on here.  They finally decided to put down some 1/2 inch plywood on the floor under the stove to get everything level...

nice butt shot hubby...lol  He bought a 6 ft level for this project and it really came in handy...this is the turn-around cabinet in the corner on the left side of the kitchen..

so now lets start on the other side.  They installed the turnaround cabinet and now are starting on the first base cabinet on what I call the island or bar as there won't be any upper cabinets over these...

and the second base cabinet on the island is done...

FINISHED!!

and FINISHED!!

If you ever install cabinets here are some little things you need to know...

 Leveling cabinets is very important.  You don't want your tomatoes rolling off the counter onto the new floor...

There was A LOT of leveling going on...moving a bit to the left, a bit to the right...adding shims...pulling shims...moving shims...oh...what's a shim?  

Let me introduce you to Bucket O'shims...

I think we used this whole bucket....

Shims are small flat pieces of wood that are shaped like a triangle with one end being smaller than the other...you shove them under or behind things to level them... I can't explain it any better than that..

Hint 2 - have a lot of band-aids...especially if you have a BIL like mine..  let's see..he hit head on the bottom of a cabinet, cut his hand on the back of a cabinet and did a great job of hitting his left little finger with the hammer and got blood EVERYWHERE!!   I think he used every band-aid I had (full disclosure means I need to say the box of band-aids wasn't a new box, but still!)..  He went home with 5 on his little finger and it was still bleeding through... I hope it stops hurting soon.. He will have a scar...probably a big one...

So Day 2 ended around 2:30pm.. Hubby and BIL got all of the BIL tools packed and toted out to his truck and he was on his way home...

We would like to publicly thank our BIL, otherwise known to the family as Uncle Don, for taking 2 vacation days and coming out to help.  We could not have done this without his help.  I can tote and carry as well as most, but I could not have held those cabinets in place on that ledger board or been as meticulous with measurements  as he is...which is a good thing when you are installing cabinets.  You need to be PERFECT and he was.  Thank You Don!

And then we installed the new lights over the bar area, packed up and came home.  Exhausted, but happy to have it all behind us.  Next up is getting final measurements for the counter top and getting that ordered and then finding a sink and faucet...

This weekend I will be painting and hubby will be installing the electric for the stove and microwave and starting to demo the hall bathroom..

Til next week....

hm...creamy oat vs angel food...

So...I decided to head out to the house last night to get a final coat on the kitchen walls.  It needs to be done and dry by Monday am as we have help coming to install the cabinets.  Can't do that and have wet paint...

I walked into the kitchen and low and behold...I HATE THE COLOR...  Now what?

the left side is the NEW paint...the right side is pretty, but way too dark..

Now is the time to fix it...right?  I stood there for a long time and finally realized that if I loved the color, I wouldn't be spending all this time trying to convince myself.  I had used a Lowe's Valspar color called Creamy Oat...  I drove down to the local hardware store and asked if they could lighten it up a bit...
I was told "no, just pick another color".  I found a wonderful pale lemon chiffon color called Angel Food.  I then drove to Columbia, took daughter and granddaughter out to eat, dropped off some Christmas presents and after buying the paint (the local hardware store was out of the base color) I got back to the house at 8:15pm.  Too late to paint? no..  Within an hour I had a coat of Angel Food on the kitchen...went to bed...and put a second coat on the kitchen this morning..along with a first coat on the living room and 3/4's of the hallway and got 5 closet insides painted white...  Not bad for a day's work..

I am back home now and tired... but I still have Christmas presents to wrap and a bit of laundry to do...


Nancy

We had help....

Rich and the son-in-law painted all the ceilings in the house and our daughter and I got a coat of color on the kitchen and two walls of the living room...

that black lump on the bottom is our daughter bending over to get more yellow paint...

that is a niche...it will get 3 white shelves.  I can't decide if I like it painted yellow or if I want to paint it white. Any comments?

Middle daughter painting the kitchen

It's really hard to see the correct color in these photos...  It's a Lowe's Valspar color called Creamy Oat...it's a not-as-pale-as-I-would-like yellow.. 

I am heading out there tonight and will put the final coat on the kitchen in the morning.  Kitchen cabinets start going in on Monday.... 

Merry Christmas everyone!! 

The early bird gets the cabinets....

At exactly 6:30am Friday I heard a "beep, beep, beep"... it sounded strangely like a truck backing up...and it was.  When the delivery man says he is going to be there at 6:30am he apparently means it...

And 20 minutes later, our living room is now full of boxes... boxes of wonderful White Linen Shenandoah Kitchen Cabinets from Lowe's...    Just so you don't think that Lowe's was at our house that early.. the cabinets came from out of state and were shipped by a private delivery company...

I had to open all the boxes and inspect all surfaces of the cabinets.  I did find some problems.  There are a lot of mitered seams that should not be seen, but are..  I will have to call Lowe's tomorrow and see what  they will do about it.  I also have two drawers that have a problem..  one has some paint chipping and one has badly bubbled paint.  

Before we can install the cabinets, we have to have the kitchen completely ready.   Saturday was my monthly quilt guild meeting..I left at 7:30am and returned at noon to find that Rich had done all the mudd and tape on the "wet" wall.

We let it dry overnight while we headed into town to get some supplies and have dinner at Lone Star.

Sunday we woke up to our first snowfall of the year.  Rich let Oliver out about 5:30am and came back to bed saying we had at least 3 inches.  I didn't believe him at first..

I guess it's a good thing we took pity on the kitties and brought them out a box and a blanket...

 The white is flea and tick powder. That's only 3 of them...not sure where the 4th one is.  I have named them finally...Paul, George, John and Ringo.... but I can't tell who is who... or is it who is whom... or whom is who...or whom is whom...whatever...I can't tell them apart...

. And  bright and early this morning Rich primed the ceiling and I did most of the walls.  We still have a few spots that have fresh mudd and weren't dry, so we will have to sand and prime those next Sunday.

The ceiling did give us a bit of a problem...  The ceilings in this house are textured.  Not sand and not popcorn, but some kind of swirl pattern..  We have one area that had kitchen cabinets hanging from the ceiling and we aren't replacing them.  We will have lower cabinets there, but no uppers. I want an open look from kitchen to the dining room.  We looked all over the local hardware store and finally found some ceiling texture.   Now we had to go back to the house and figure out how to use it.  By looking at the ceiling we could see that he did a swirl pattern.  We used a 4 inch short stubby brush and I practiced on a scrap piece of drywall...

I might just hire myself out...lol

And we finished early and got to be home by 1pm...  That's 5-6 hours early...  I'm happy we got to leave in the daylight as the roads were ok, but the wind was so bad the snow was just swirling over the highway and cold!!!  Temp was down to 17F...

 So looks like we are on schedule to install the cabinets between Christmas and New Years...

Plumbing done....check
New insulation....check
dry wall up....check
Mudd and tape....check
ceiling and walls primed....check
ceiling texture done.... check

Next weekend we will paint the ceiling and get everything ready...We will only have one day to work, as my family Christmas is Saturday...

more plumbing...

It doesn't seem like much, but we moved the bed from the living room to bedroom... I still need to get something to cover the windows as there is a dusk to dawn light that's gonna keep us up...

And we moved all the kitchen stuff to one of the other bedrooms ...

And we finished all the kitchen plumbing.  It doesn't sound like a lot, but we only had one day..Sunday Rich had to leave on a business trip, so we drove home Saturday night..

I will be leaving tonight to go back out as we got the call that our cabinets are to be delivered tomorrow sometime between 6:30am - 10:30am.  Yep...that's not a typo.... it's 6:30AM... and when I questioned the time frame I was told that this "delivery man is a early riser" and we are "the only delivery so it's gonna be closer to the 6:30am time..."  Wonderful...

The call....

Today the call came...

The one we have been waiting for...

The kitchen cabinets are set to be delivered either Thursday or Friday of this week...

Need to finish that plumbing and get some drywall up in the kitchen...

new tool...

Thanksgiving day when Rich's sister and husband were here for dinner, he told us about a new tool...

This house has tons of wires poking out everywhere...  we have no way of knowing if they are live or dead... This little tool  saves you from being fried..   You put it next to the wire and it beeps if the wire is hot..

Thanks for the tip Don. It works!!