The Kitchen: Current State

Things are in high gear and we are making more progress. We're basically at Home Depot's mercy at this point, waiting for our countertops to be templated and then ordered. But here's a quick sneak peak at what you would see in the kitchen if you came over...Cabinets! Microwave! Finished floors! And you can't see it from this picture, but the fridge is in it's permanent spot and the water/ice has been hooked back up!

Hopefully the stove will go back in this week. We ordered amazing cabinet knobs and pulls from Ebay and they should be here Thursday. I think they will really make the cabinets look finished and I can't wait to see them! I also have 2 special projects to share - hopefully I'll be blogging about one of them this week.

We're in the home stretch!

The Kitchen: True Romance

You know you are well into a renovation when you decide to be super romantic and surprise your husband by finishing all the grouting in the hallway while he's working late. I put my reno skills to the test by grouting all by myself and I have to say, I did a pretty darn good job! And J was SUPER excited and surprised to come home to all that work being done already. That frees him up to do more difficult projects tomorrow, like wiring (do you like my romantic gesture really being a ploy to get more stuff done?)

Pictures soon! It's coming together!

The Kitchen: Grout

We have grout! We went with a light grey grout and I'm in love with it. We just have to do one more round of de-hazing the tile and then seal the grout and the floor in the kitchen is DONE. Of course, we still have to do the entire foyer and hallway, but I'm celebrating this as one big part of the kitchen being done. Cabinets should start going in soon, which is crazy to me. I really might be cooking in my kitchen by July!

Happy weekend - wish me luck, I'm running in a 10k tomorrow morning!

The Kitchen: Scenes from a Holiday weekend

Pictures of us scraping old thinset mortar off the floors are very boring. So are pictures of us laying the new concrete subfloor and screwing about 10,000 screws to hold it in. But here's a quick photo montage of what we did on our kitchen project this weekend. We took full advantage of 3 days off to make some pretty major progress (and I still managed to make it to the pool and get some sun!) Upper cabinets have been hung and the tile floor in the kitchen is laid, it just needs to be grouted.

The Kitchen: Floor Demo

Our first step in completely demolishing our kitchen was to get the gross floor tile up. They rent these machines at Home Depot that pretty much do it for you, but that would be far too easy. My wonderful husband decided to use a "scraper" to get up all the tiles manually - as in back breaking work. However, once he got started, it actually went super fast and easy. We got the entire floor up in 2.5 hours. Starting to scrape after we moved the fridge and stove out of the kitchen.

It started slowly and then all the sudden, we hit a major groove and it went really quickly. Progress!

Goodbye tile! We definitely filled 4 of those big trashcans with all the tile and grout.I was in charge of cleanup...And this was the state of the kitchen after 1 day of working for 2.5 hours. Not too shabby!

Next up - cabinet demo! And a trip to the commercial dump, which was an eye opening experience!

The Kitchen: Before

So the reason I haven't blogged in a few weeks is because we have officially started our massive renovation of the kitchen. And I'm already over it. We're doing EVERYTHING ourselves, so obviously things move sort of slowly (even though I am impressed by how much we've gotten done so far). We are gutting everything and bringing in new floors, cabinets, countertops, lighting, paint, etc. Luckily we've been upgrading our appliances since we moved in and the only new appliance we will need is a microwave.

So here are our "before" pictures, so you can see the yuck we have been dealing with..Outdated Cabinets, gross white laminate countertops, nasty white tile floorsThe Floors - my nemesis. White tile with brown grout. We have a feeling the grout didn't start out as brown when it was installed. The tile was in super bad shape and never stayed or looked clean. We have it in the foyer and entry hallway as well, so it wasn't very welcoming. Close up of how gross our cabinets were. We scrubbed them down when we moved in 2 years ago and it didn't really help because there was so much grime and build up. The laminate counters were peeling away from the wall...lovely!

So that's what we lived with for 2 years! I'll be back with our current progress - let's just say the demo is already done and now we're just working on putting it back together...

Gone to Carolina...