Kitchen progress

The cabinets went in back in June, and it was the biggest relief.  I had honestly been up a few nights, terrified that we made a mistake.  We spent more money on the cabinets alone than almost any project in our house - I think only replacing every window in the house beats it out - and I based that decision on a 4" by 4" sample they sent us.  I knew I loved the walnut kitchens I saw on Pinterest, but these guys didn't make those cabinets.  All they sent us was a 4" by 4" block of walnut.  I carried that block everywhere for months to match it up to everything else we were doing.

So when the cabinets were in and we both loved them, I could take a deep breath.

We bought the flooring before the cabinets were installed, since that takes a couple of weeks to arrive and had to be installed before the countertop. So we had a template guy come and measure for the counters the day after the cabinets went in, and then headed to San Diego.  Christopher started on the floors when we got back, but he had a Scout trip to Lake Powell for a few days the next week.  The week after that, we were gone for three days for Trek.  Originally the counters were going in the day after Trek, but they had scheduling issues and pushed it back.  Christopher was furious with them, but to be honest, I think that was needed on our end, too.  We arrived home, exhausted, and had maybe a quarter of the floor in.  Counters the next morning would have meant no sleep that night at all.  My parents came into town, and then we all went to Idaho three days later, and when we got home, THEN he finally was able to get the entire floor down in time for the counters.

The floors are vinyl plank, which we picked because it is waterproof.  I was worried (I did a lot of worrying) that the floors would be too dark, but they I think it really works well.  The "Black Walnut" goes well with the walnut cabinets.

The counters add enough lightness to make the dark floors work.

I wanted to keep the white appliances (I seem to be in a minority, but I don't like dark or stainless), so white counters seemed like a good match.  Christopher was the one who picked the sparkles in the counter, which is something that amazes everyone.  I didn't have a big emotion about it, but he really wanted speckles in the counter, and loved the sparkling bits of mirror in this one.  I'm just glad that the white is the same true white as the appliances.

Actually, the part I was most excited about was having a sink.  And a dishwasher.

We knew that renovating the kitchen would be hard.  Awful, even.  I expected that it would be really difficult to cook and feed my family.  What I didn't quite anticipate was how impossible it would be to clean anything.  We had crock pots and our grill has a burner outside, so I could cook in a pot out there.  I just couldn't sanitize the dishes afterward.  We had a laundry room sink, which is where we usually clean paint brushes out, and the kids have a bathtub, which is as clean as a child's bathtub gets, I suppose.  Neither of those seemed sanitary to me.  I kept rinsing all the food off of the dishes and then piling them in the laundry room sink, intending to spend an hour and scrub every last bit of paint off of that sink so we could clean the dishes. Instead, I we were running from road trip to road trip, and I was lucky to keep up on anything.  When my sweet neighbor (who fed us for a week straight in June and will forever be my favorite person for that) called and asked if she could bring us dinner one  night, I told her that the favor I really needed was to run a load through her dishwasher.  She laughed really hard, but I was just so grateful she waved me on over, because I had no idea what else to do.

So when I had running water in a sink, and a dishwasher again, it was like heaven.  I now know from experience that families in a kitchen renovation need meals brought over even more than families with a new baby.  Eating on a real plate with real forks was glorious.

After this point, the progress got a lot slower.  Christopher had been so optimistic with our timeline.  He was sure that we would be 100% done by mid July, but he just didn't count on how much we would be out of town.  (And how much we would wait for counters.)  I was hoping to be done before the kids were in school.  We just didn't count on how exhausted we would be.  Once we got it to a livable point, we needed to focus on our kids and Chris had to focus on his job.  It was time to regain sanity.

So we did little things slowly.  I finished my side project a week later.

The built in bookshelf had been painted a beige to match the brick.  When the cabinet installers finished, the left behind a significant pile of trim and molding left over from their job.  Since the cabinets are truly custom, they couldn't really use it anywhere else.  So I decided that the bookcase needed trim on the front to match the cabinets.  Christopher washed his hands of the whole thing, because the last thing he wanted was an extra project.  So my dad helped me cut the crown molding when he was in town, and we tested the nail gun out on some scrap.

It turns out that an electric nail gun is just not powerful enough for solid walnut.

Christopher eventually bought a new nail gun, and it worked like a charm.

I'm rather proud of how it came out. I am especially glad that the big trim perfectly covered the empty three inches below the bottom shelf. Why someone built it like that, I'll never know.  I think there were originally doors on the top and bottom sections, but all we had left was the screw holes from hinges.  All covered up now!

A week or two later, Christopher installed the final appliance.

I think it was about this time that we picked out and bought the backsplash tile, too.  But we were just exhausted. When anyone asked us if our kitchen was done, we just had to tell them not yet - by choice.  We needed a break.  The only inconvenience left was running extension cords to use small appliances on the counter, since outlets had to wait for a backsplash, but that was mild.