Cabinet Door Update

Some of the cabinet doors are now hung.  The drawers are in as well.  We no longer have to walk to the pantry for silverware!!

I still need to do a couple coats on some of the doors to even out the finish, but it's really starting to come together.  The new paint on the cabinets really freshens up the room and gives a much cleaner and neater appearance.  With any luck I'll be installing the new countertops next weekend.

Walls and Cabinets Painted - Check

We spent a weekend painting the ceiling and walls a while back.  The color turned out really nice.  We're not sure if it goes all that well with our light honey stained woodwork in the kitchen, but maybe we'll get around to refinishing that someday.

The cabinets are finally painted and now it's time to drill some holes for knobs.  It took 3-4 coats to get a decent finish on the doors and bases.  The first couple coats dried a bit rough and you could really see the overlaps of paint and brush/roller marks.  But after the next coat or two, the dried finish smoothed out a bit.  For the most part, I applied the paint with 12" lint-resistant roller and then smoothed it as best I could by very light rolling over it with a small foam roller.  I think the overall outcome is better than what we would have achieved with just a brush.

I had to set up a workstation down in the basement (since it's below freezing outside) and then do what I can to keep the dog hair and laundry fluff from settling onto the wet paint.

Overall, I was pretty successful.  I'm sure I'll see a few hairs here and there once all the doors are hung.

We also had some issues with our microwave recently.  On Thanksgiving day it just stopped working -- absolutely no power at all.  It was still under warranty with Sharp, so I arranged to have a local company come out to fix it.  They came, worked on it, said it was working, and left.  The next day Melanie tried to heat up some food and four minutes later the food was still cold.  It became a huge ordeal...  I would NEVER call this company again to service anything.  Anyway, it's finally working again and now back to the rest of the kitchen makeover.

We're also planning on hanging some bi-fold doors here to hide the coat, recycle bins, and dog food.  We'll worry about that once we have everything else done.

Still to do:
Drill holes in doors for knobs
Install hardware
Hang doors, install drawers
Install new countertops and sink
Add subway tile backsplash
Install under-cabinet lights above the sink
Hang doors to hide coats/dog food/recycle bins

Finally! Time to redo the kitchen!

When we bought this house, we knew the bathroom would have to be gutted and redone before we moved in....  and we knew that somewhere down the road, we would need to make some changes in the kitchen.  Well, we've reached that point in the road and we're sick of cooking in this:

And this...

The whole kitchen is a bit dated, dirty, and ugly.  So, we're doing a small-budget kitchen makeover.  We've ordered new laminate countertops to replace the scratched up white with gold flecks countertops we have now.  We'll replace the laminate backsplash with some leftover subway tile we have from the bathroom.  We'll also be painting the walls cabinets -- from tan to off-white.  These should make a huge different in the look of the room.

For now, I'm working on the ceiling.  We had to take out the soffit above the cabinets to run pipe upstairs when we put in new plumbing -- plus it was ugly...  So I've patched that area and the hole in the ceiling I had to make to attach the bathtub drain.  We also had some sagging areas in the drywall, so I cut those out and patched them as well.

Next up: ceiling paint!!!

The Only Living Thing Worth Keeping In Our Yard

and these two I guess...

Lately, it seems we've made lots of trips to the hardware store and spent lots of money on this and that for the house, yet we haven't really done a whole lot.  Until a few days ago...  We kicked it into high gear!

 
When we put in new plumbing, we had to tear out the sophit above the cabinets to maneuver the pipes into place.  Aftwards, however, we were left with a hugh hole in the ceiling.  Give me a few more months and I should have it taped and mudded...

We also painted the upstairs hallway and the dining room.

After a recent storm, we had a huge puddle of water at one corner of the house where water had just poured over the side of the gutter.  So I climbed out the window onto the roof and found the gutter completely full of extremely stinky sludge.  And the root of the problem???  A tennis ball stuck at the connection to the downspout.  Wth tennis ball and sludge now gone, we'll see what happens next time it rains.

Family is coming a couple times in the next month, so hopefully we'll probably make some more progress soon.

A Much Needed Update

We've made a few improvements the past couple months... After finally getting all the parts we needed, we now have a working shower upstairs.
 

Thursday night I took down the unsightly 70s era light fixture and installed our beautiful, Home Depot issued fixture.
 

One thing that has really bothered me about the exterior of the house (other than the color) is the glue (Liquid Nails?) used to hang large address numbers on the front of the porch.  At some point, previous owners took off the numbers, but the glue stuck around...  (pun intended)
 

I cleaned the siding yesterday with detergent and sprayed it down.  Today I matched the color and bought a quart of acrylic exterior paint.  Now...  no more nasty glue!


 
Ahhh...  much better.