Showing posts with label Kitchen. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kitchen. Show all posts

Whew!

It seems like I'm getting worse and worse about updating this blog...but we've been so busy working our butts off lately. Our big deadline for ourselves was Easter, and I gotta say we did pretty good. The counter tops are installed, the dishwasher works, and we've actually got a working sink. The only thing that doesn't work in our kitchen is the stove top...which is fine. I can deal with that. To finally be able to use real dishes is good enough for me now. Of course, as usual, it wouldn't have been possible without the help of many great people. :)

Here is the kitchen, as of today:
Besides the stove top, we've still got to get the hardware on the cabinets, woodwork to put up, and doors to refinish. We aren't going to rush into everything, Josh and I both agreed on taking the week off to relax a bit.
We did have Easter here, with both Josh's family and my family. I wanted all (two) of Jayden's cousins to be here so we could have an Easter Egg Hunt and do fun kids stuff. The Easter egg hunt went much better than I thought it would, I thought Ethan would be the only one to go after any of the eggs, but Taylor really went for them too! Jayden just kept wandering off. :)

Getting ready for the hunt! (Nice front porch, huh?)

"Hey dad, I think there's an egg over there"
"Hey son, I think there's an egg right here"


Ethan and Heather

Taylor

Jayden, in his Easter duds. Thanks again for the shirt and tie Aunt Meep Meep and Aunt Memee!
This is what happens when you try to get a smile by asking to see Jayden's mouth. Mmm...chocolaty.

One of the many things Jayden received for Easter was Pee-Wee's Playhouse Volume #2. We already had Volume #1, Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, and Pee-Wee's Christmas Special. "I had a thing for Pee-Wee growing up, and I recieved the DVDs for Christmas a couple of years ago. I thought it was time to introduce Pee-Wee to Jayden. Jayden wasn't all that interested in watching TV, he would sit for maybe five minutes at a time. Well, now he's a Pee-Wee addict. We have to have the show on all day. If we turn it off, we get a pitiful, overly dramatic Jayden crying up at the DVD player "Peeeeeweeeeee! Peeeeeweeeee" with real tears in his eyes. If you start singing the theme song, he'll join right in. If he's having a tantrum, and you just mention "Pee-Wee" he cheers right up and starts saying "Pee-Wee!" with his hands excitedly up to his mouth, while running into the living room. He's even starting to get the Tequila dance down. I just thought I'd share a bit of whats going on in our house right now. It's all Pee-Wee, all the time. And the sad part? I love it. I really do. I finally have an excuse to watch my Pee-Wee DVDs.


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The kitchen saga continues...

Well, I finally let myself do something I'd been fighting against for months. I got excited about the kitchen. I actually let myself believe that it might be done sometime in the not so distant future. To the point of actually telling everyone to plan on Easter being held here. *sigh*
As I've written before, we had a few problems with our cabinets. The kitchen cabinet guy came yesterday, something I wasn't really looking forward to because I was afraid he'd get in a mood about it. He's kind of like that. I went over the list with him bit by bit.
  • The drawer fronts were all wrong. They're flat fronts, when they were supposed to match cabinet doors. He said that the guy that did our kitchen as since been fired because he ordered a lot of stuff wrong, he even told me that he had an entire kitchen in his warehouse that he has to get rid of because it was completely wrong. He then went on to tell me that the drawers I want are much more expensive and that I didn't actually pay for that type of drawer.
  • Our window wasn't centered between the upper cabinets, even though we moved the entire window so it would be centered above the sink. It wasn't something that we noticed right away because the kitchen was ordered before the window was moved. He said that we could get a 12 inch cabinet to replace the 15 cabinet that was ordered and things should be centered up.
  • Two cabinets came broken, one completely busted. He just looked them over to see if they could be repaired, but they were pretty far gone.
  • We were supposed to receive posts for our island from a different company, we received the stain so we could match the posts, but the actual posts weren't ordered.

In the end he said that he had a proposition for me. He would pay for the new 12 inch cabinet so the window would be centered, he'd pay for the broken cabinets (isn't that kind? the cabinets that came broken?) and he would pay for the posts. But he wanted me to pay for the new drawers. I said no, I already paid for drawers. His argument was that I didn't actually pay for the drawers I wanted and that they were much more expensive, my argument was that when I signed my check, I was paying for the drawers I wanted, and our loan is closed and we don't have pocket money for new drawers. Finally, he said "Fine, I just thought I'd see if you'd be fair about it all." Not the best thing to say. He agreed to pay for the drawers, but only because my mom is such a good customer of his (which he mentioned numerous times). I guess my business or happiness as a customer doesn't count. He said he'd order everything and walked through the house and out the door without telling me when the cabinets would arrive, or even a simple goodbye. I'd meant to ask him to go ahead and measure for the counter top, since most of the lower cabinets were okay...but I didn't get the chance. So now, after being so close to having a functional kitchen, we're stuck waiting again.

That's it for my rant. Hopefully I'll be posting about my nearly finished kitchen sometime before Easter.

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An Architecture Tour of Burlington

This weeks topic for Photo Hunt is architecture. So, rather than just putting up one picture, I thought I'd put up a few of my home town, Burlington.


This is the Great River Bridge over the Mississippi.


This is the train bridge.
This is the Memorial Auditorium on the riverfront, it's currently getting a bit of a face lift.
This is a block downtown that is pretty much vacant. Our downtown has beautiful buildings, but many of them have set empty for years. I worked in the bookshelf building on the right when it was a costume shop.This is my mom's house, the real reason for my house rehabilitation craziness. It sat empty for 20 years with the windows boarded up, without electricity or plumbing until she bought it.

This is a view from my mom's house of Saint John's Church.
Another view from my mom's house of the downtown and Snake Alley.

Here it is with fresh snow. :)




PSHunt

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Kitchen Cabinet Update







We got a very good start on the kitchen cabinets tonight, thanks to so much help from so many people. I have no idea how we would survive without family! So far, there are a few problems: the drawers are wrong, they're flat fronts and they're supposed to be framed like the cabinets, and one of the doors is warped. So far, that's it. Otherwise, everything is starting to look really nice, our kitchen already looks smaller!











And here is Scott, my brother in law, hard at work doing his Madonna impersonation.
Sorry ladies, he's taken.

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The cabinets are here!

3:15 PM by Anonymous 1 Comments
The kitchen cabinets are here!




Now all we have to do is take them out of the boxes and screw them up on the walls. Piece of cake.

Of course, Jayden promptly got lost in the only cabinet that was out of the box, which happened to be behind many other boxes that I couldn't get through.

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What a weekend!

Thank you Mother Nature for trimming our trees, really, we appreciate it. Now could you kindly come and clean up your mess?


I really can't complain, we really weren't too affected by the storm that came through this weekend...unless you count the distraction the storm gave us from our actual work on the house. Everyone else in our family, except Kimmie who was at work, were without power for all of Saturday, and some through Sunday, and my mom up until this morning. I can't say that we were the best place to take refuge, considering we don't have a kitchen and our house has a thick layer of drywall dust covering every inch. Not to mention the lack of guest room, or extra bedding for that matter (we've only been on our own for less than two years, we haven't built up any extra bedding yet). But we were good enough for the evening, until everyone made their way over to Kimmie's house for the night, or back home. Josh's parents lost some limbs, and an actual tree which gave way to Taylor's first sentance "Uh oh, tree down!"

I can't say we were completely unaffected, we were left without phones, cable, and >gasp< Internet. So, we had to find other ways to entertain ourselves, which didn't necessarily mean working on our house. We drove by Perkins Park and noticed that a top of a tree had fallen onto the walkway bridge.

After that, we drove to Crapo Park. They lost a pretty big tree, but it looked like it wouldn't have lasted much longer anyway. The city forestry is definitely going to have their hands busy.


Believe it or not, we did manage to get some work done. Heather and Ethan came up on Friday and Heather scrubbed the floors while I worked on painting five coats of paint on the red section (tinted primer included). The rest of the weekend was spent working on the floor, painting the ceiling, doing a little bit more prep on the walls, and actually getting a coat of paint on the walls.
This is the red section and ceiling painted, I'll post a picture of the walls once they've been edged and painted a couple of times. We're VERY close. Woohoo!

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Stain, paint, or varnish?

I talked to the ceiling guy today, and he said that he'd be here on Tuesday...so by the end of the week we should have a finished kitchen ceiling! Woohoo! So, all we need to do before we can hang cabinets is finish a little bit of sanding on the walls, primer, and paint.
My only problem right now is deciding how and when to finish the floors in the kitchen. Josh and I originally wanted to do a diagonal checkered pattern with a cream and brown stone...but given the size of the kitchen, it was just too expensive. Instead we decided to put down pine flooring. A couple of reasons we decided to go with pine were that we wouldn't have to put down an underlayment, and since pine isn't really anything special I wouldn't feel bad covering it up if we were able to get the nice flooring down the road. I don't really like the color of pine, so I'm not sure if I want to simply varnish the floors, or do something that will take away from the pine color.

Here are my options so far:
  • I could simply varnish the floors, it would be the easiest most time effective way to go.
  • I could stain the floors with a checkered pattern. Here a couple of pictures I found on the Country Living website that made me drool:

  • I could paint a checkered pattern on the floor, like the folks at Enon Hall.

If anyone has any suggestions or pointers, please let me know. I have a horrible time making decisions, and I've made way too many this past year...I think I'm burning out. Our kitchen cabinets are Cherry Shaker, and the walls will be a green with red accent.

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New desk and our kitchen layout!

Well, another weekend has already come and gone...it feels like they're getting shorter and shorter anymore. I found a desk that I liked on craigslist.com, so we spent Saturday driving up to Iowa City to pick it up. It's four separate pieces, we're planning on splitting it up and using the desk with hutch in one area, and the cabinet with hutch in another area.

Here's a picture that the sellers sent me:
I'm not all that wild about the color, but I'll wait a year or so before I make any changes. Mostly because I've got too many projects I'm working on right now to add another. The desk is pretty much the perfect shape and size for the area that we're working with. I don't think I've shared the kitchen plans on here yet, but here it is with the little arrow pointing to the desk space.


On Sunday we finished putting up drywall, added some plaster, and got a start on some of the sanding. Josh also work on getting his stereo system up and going. We added a built in shelving in the living room, and it holds all of our stereo equipment, and DVDs. There are plug ins in every other shelf, and all of the wires run out of the back, and they are wired into the wall. When we had the furnace put in, they had to run some ducts up here, so this was our way to use some of the lost space. Here's a picture, so you can get an idea of it. (It's kind of an old picture, but I'm no good at explaining things, so it's better than nothing)


So, that sums up the weekend. Exciting stuff huh? Apparently we have another winter storm coming, and let me tell you, I am NOT happy about it. After the beautiful weekend, I thought it was over, I thought Spring was coming. Yeah right, there's a supposed 6-10 inches coming our way. Which means that Josh will be stuck out driving in it all day, and Jayden and I will be stuck indoors again. So if anyway has any ideas of ANYTHING I can do to keep Jayden preoccupied. Let me know. The kid is going stir crazy with this weather. And stir crazy kids cause crazy mommas.

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More kitchen progress

The weekend work went very well, I didn't do much besides chasing after Jayden and doing laundry...but with the help of his dad, Josh got a lot of work done! He finished running the plumbing up to the master bathroom on the second floor, so now we're able to put up the ceiling (by we, I mean our ceiling guy). Right now, we're trying to pick out some paint colors. We'll have an accent wall of red, cherry cabinets, and pine floors. This is the red color we've picked out, it's pretty strong, but I like it. It'll be an accent color throughout the house.
Right now, we're thinking of going with a sage green. But, I'm not exactly sure. I was going to go with a creamy color, but our family room and living room are yellow, so I think it would be too much. If anyone has any ideas, let me know!

And, because I like pictures...here are a few from this weekends work!


Aw, isn't that sweet, Josh and Joe working on the plumbing and little Jayden playing with the torch.

Josh finishing up the plumbing. Woohoo! Of course we still have to do the kitchen plumbing, but I'm hoping that that will be the easy part.

And Jayden, cause he's cute.

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Kitchen update, LOTS of pictures!

Finally, an update! Sorry for lagging a bit on updating the blog, but life has been keeping us pretty busy. We've been hard at work in the kitchen, it's actually starting to resemble more of a room now. Josh and I had spent the previous week trying to clear out the kitchen, and find permanent homes for a lot of our construction related objects. My Uncle Perry was hard at work (as usual) getting a lot of our electrical wired in. This past weekend my mom, Uncle, Josh, Jayden and I all worked on getting up as much of the drywall as we could. We got a lot farther than I thought we would! We still need to do the ceiling, which is going to be a lot of work. Josh and I are both against drywalling it ourselves, because that is just the worst job imaginable in our minds. So, we're either going to do a plank ceiling or we're going to hire the guys that did the rest of our ceilings to come in and do this room too.
I realize that I haven't given much a "flashback" post on the kitchen progress. So I thought I'd show a few pictures of our progress, from start to now to get you all a little bit more up to speed. I'm trying to post pictures that are all taken from two different viewpoints, so it doesn't get too confusing. The kitchen has been by far the biggest project in the house. We (meaning mostly my Uncle Perry) replaced the floor, the ceiling including beams, and the entire East wall.

This is what it looked like looking Northeast in the Kitchen when we first bought it. Our current kitchen space was originally a kitchen, a weird room (the room this pic was taken in) and a full bath.
This is in the original kitchen area, looking Southeast.

This is after we began demo (duh!) looking Northeast, and the bathroom wall, and the wall separating the kitchen from the weird room was starting to come down.
Looking Northeast all of the walls are down, and we're completely gutted.

Looking Northeast again, the new two by fours here are a brace that my Uncle Perry built to hold up the house so we could tear off the back wall without the rest of the house caving in.

Looking Southeast after the wall was down (duh again, sorry, I explain in detail because I get confused easily myself).

Looking Northeast after we started fixing the floor. We tore up one side, and Perry replaced the floor joists because they were in horrible shape after rotting, and being cut through for various pipes and wires so much. After he fixed that side, we tore up the rest of the room and put down 8" wide pine floorboards.

Looking Northeast after the floors had been replaced, and we started building the wall for the half bath.


And FINALLY we get to this past weekend. You thought I was kidding when I said Jayden helped out, didn't you? He made sure everything was good and level.

Here we are, looking Northeast. Isn't the drywall pretty? It's practically ready for the cabinets!


And, once again, because kids are cute and I think it's the best way to end a post, here is a picture of Jayden and my nephew Ethan. They are becoming the best of pals!

That is all for today, and if you are still actually reading what I've written rather than just looking at pictures...thanks for reading! Feel free to leave a comment so I know who's lurking out there!

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Back to the kitchen

Now that the bathroom is up and running, we finally get to shift our concentration over to the kitchen. First on our agenda in the kitchen: clear it out so we can have some space to work in. Currently we've got all of our tools, appliances, boards, drywall, paint, and anything else we don't want in the main area of the house, thrown into this room. So, the only real thing we're going to work on this weekend is finding new places for all of this stuff.



Meanwhile, we decided to get a little fancy for lunch and break out the George. I had to borrow Jayden's play spatula though, because the plastic stuff we use daily would have become part of the sandwich.

Some day, we'll look back at this picture and be thankful for our counter tops, real plates, kitchen utensils that won't melt, and a stove top.

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