Monday, June 15, 2009

The Kitchen.

Big weekend. We now have a semblance of a kitchen.

On Friday, after work, I rushed home to remove the old counter top, hook up the dishwasher, and do some counter support work around it (the old counter was being supported by the dishwasher. This is a bad idea). As I was finishing up the support stuff, the counter folks showed up and got to work. A few hours later, three counter tops had been installed and we had actual food preparation surfaces throughout the kitchen. Hooray.

I spent the first half of Saturday prepping some more exterior window trim for paint. Since it's been raining for the past 13 weeks, I was happy to be outside, but unhappy to be scraping and sanding old red paint.

A quick aside about the weather: the one good thing that came from all of this rain lately is the fact that I haven't had to water the lawns for two hours a day. They are growing in nicely, as evidenced by this shot of the back yard (the grass is probably 5-7 inches long):



While I was outside and on to the painting, Amanda was finishing up the construction of the third and fourth curtains for the house. Only twenty five hundred to go. When she was out of fabric, she relieved me of my painting work and took over. All of the windows on one side of the house are painted. It's a marked improvement:



While Amanda was painting outside, I got cracking on tiling the back splash above the new counter. Many tile cuts and hours later, I had finished up the first step to proper tiling and we called it a day.

Sunday brought more crappy weather, so we went to Home Depot and picked up all kinds of stuff (wainscoting, second floor bathroom floor tiles, sawhorses, etc). Once we lugged it all into the house, I got to the second step of proper tiling; grout. My mother is terrible at this. Thankfully, I am much better. A couple of hours with some grout and a float, and I was finished up. The third and final step to proper tiling is today, and once the grout is sealed, the kitchen will be that much closer to completion. What's left? Cabinet doors and drawers. What else? Why electricity of course. Thanks Ron...

Here's the sink, subway tile and counters:



Also exciting this weekend? We finally got to use the stove . It's been sitting there, basically just acting as a clock for months. We didn't really have any surfaces to prepare food, or at least ones that weren't covered in dust/paint, so we never tried it for fear of lead poisoning. The good oven news is, it works. Here's the proof:



Delicious.

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