Update in pictures

Tired. Tiled until 2:00 AM last night and got up and at it again at 7:00 this morning. Must go to bed. Here are some pictures for you... words to come later.

Domestikat's pop quiz

I'll give you one guess at what I spent the better part of the day doing today.

Did you guess tiling? Holy crapola, Einstein, you are genius!

I had really really really wanted to lay my tile in a herringbone pattern, but the more I thought about it, the more that seemed like too much trouble. I worried that I might regret not trying it out, but after putting in around 12 hours of tiling today, I realize how time and labor intensive it would have been and I can say that I'm loving my back splash one hundred percent and I have zero regrets.

So far I've done two and a half walls and hope to finish up laying them tomorrow. I'll probably grout them mid-week. You have to see the full effect of the tile with the counter top (and right now the counter top is covered in painter's paper and... you guessed it, cardboard!). When I do my week in review, I'll post a picture that captures it all, but in the mean time, here's a teaser (and can I just say that those little spacer dudes are perhaps the greatest invention of all time).

Better

So here is my counter top. Le sigh.

And here is the same shot I've been taking all along to show my progress on the kitchen.

If you ever build your own kitchen from scratch, and you use IKEA cabinets and you think, what in the ever-loving world am I going to do with all this cardboard, and then you think, I don't want to ruin my newly refinished floors with all this crazy kitchen building going on, then you should make a cardboard floor. Nice, huh? It's gotten to the point where in some areas I am 4 or 5 layers deep, and that, my friends is when my great idea of a cardboard floor is really a cover-up for my lazy patoot not wanting to take the boxes out to the recycling bin.

The prognosis

Counters aren't level one direction--after a total meltdown that made me cry on the inside, but keep a brave face on for the contractors--we found a solution which did not require me to take the cabinets off the wall and reinstall them. THANK GOD!

The pipe is seeping. It's from cabinet installation (Man of Iron and I were a little aggressive, I guess). So I have to cut a bigger hole around the pipe and my plumber's going to go in with a blow torch and fuse the pipe back together. We all have to hold our breath that the house doesn't catch fire when he does this. He'll be back on Saturday for the operation.

My stomach hurts.

Counter count down

My do it herselferness (yes, as of now, that's a word) is shining through as of late. Exhibit A) my HVAC solution I posted about yesterday. Exhibit B)the 1/8th of an inch I had to take off of the sink cabinet so I could get the lip of the sink to lie level with the cabinets. Oh boy, what I did to make that happen... it was not pretty. But thankfully, the sink and the counter top will hide any signs of my chisel gouges.


And speaking of counter tops... they get installed tomorrow morning. I can't wait to post pictures. You all will pass out. And I'll have to come over to your house and resuscitate you just so you can take a second look at the amazingness that will be my counters. Thank goodness I'm CPR certified!


Here's one last look at the cabinets sans top.


Oh, and keep your fingers crossed that I didn't break a pipe. I'm having some water issues in the back of the sink cabinet next to one of the pipes. I just noticed it today, so I must have done something yesterday. I have the plumber coming out tomorrow to take a look at it. I so hope I don't get bad news from him and then ruin counter top day!

Three weeks in review...

Okay, so I've been delinquent in blogging about the house. I'm struggling with a little thing we in the business like to call "burnout." And when I say we, I mean me, and when I say business, I have no idea what I'm talking about.

I'll let you in on a little secret... closer... come closer... closer... I WANT TO BE DONE WITH MY KITCHEN!

So now that I have that off my chest let me recap what I've done.

1. More cabinet assembly--I can put together an IKEA kitchen cabinet in less than 17 minutes. Boo-yah.

2. Cabinet installation and making a refrigerator look like it's built in--Psych. It's a cover panel. Monster and the Commish are quite the installation gurus. The three of us are like the dream team of cabinet installation--as long as we have the right sized drill bit.

3. Complete do it herself HVAC solution--I have a heating vent in the old chimney which is now behind the pseudo wall the Man of Iron and I built. During construction we came up with a good solution for how to get the vent connected to the register that will be in the toe kick of the new pantry (don't worry if that confused you, when all is said and done I'll have a picture of it for you), but our original solution wasn't going to work. So I pretended like I knew what I was doing and ended up with this:
It may not be such a sight to behold, but I will tell you I figured out a solution all by myself--and I taped that puppy up so good that it is tightly sealed. There will be no heat loss there (and I should be putting it to the test now, but I refuse to turn on the heat in mid-June, even if it is 56 degrees in the house...)


4. Baseboard molding--these boards were too tall compared to the rest of the house (needed them around 9 3/4 inches) so the Commish and I ripped them (highly technical term there, people) and then I installed them.

Someday they will be puttied and painted along with the other molding. And can I just say that I'm particularly proud of this little guy that I measured and cut for this funky corner.

The details are going to matter in this kitchen, but they are also driving me nuts. So many little things to do--so little motivation to actually do them these days.

5. Back splash tiling--So I haven't started tiling, but have spent hours upon hours pricing out my tile and delaying my commitment to actually try and replicate this herringbone pattern on the walls.

Someone has a lot of tile cutting and probably cursing in her near future.
I will be kicking it into high gear the next couple weeks, with the goal to have this completed before the end of June--and a possible 4th of July, or maybe Cinqo de July-O party to celebrate.

Have I mentioned that I CAN'T WAIT TO BE DONE WITH THIS KITCHEN?

Trim-Trimoree, Trim-Trimmoree...

I spent my Friday night and almost my whole Saturday focused on trimming out the three doorways in the kitchen. I'll sand down the wood filler and paint them this week. DomestiKat tired, must go to bed. More stories when I do the week in review (tomorrow). For now, the pictures will need to suffice...

Look Ma!

It's level.

Heck yes I can install cabinets (and now thanks to me, and the crazy Norse engineers at IKEA, so can the Man of Iron, Monster, and the Commish... thanks friends).

Cabinet installation is almost complete. The really important ones are in and are blow-your-mind amazing. Look and see below to see the new cabinets (and just remember, this is how they looked one month ago).

Here's a fun little cabinet--that the Commish and I cursed and cursed when attaching the fancy cover panel too, but it looks so nice now--that will house wine, cookbooks, and other fun trinkets in the drawers (ignore the half assembled lazy Susan, she's just living up to her name).

And here's the space for the new dishwasher. A dishwasher! Yay! I can't even wait. What you can't tell by looking at this picture is the painstaking process it took to make this piece of laminated wood be perfectly level, perfectly sized, and the perfect distance away from the other cabinets. I pretended I was Bob-freaking-Villa and busted out with some ingenious solutions and then the Commish and I rocked cutting that bad boy down to size.You know how sometimes dogs, when they are really excited about something, pee all over. Yeah, I just did that.