The kitchen is done!!

I'm busy moving into the new kitchen, reorganizing, and of course trying to clean the rest of the house (which looks like a bomb has hit it, not to mention the laundry piled up since the washer and dryer were on the patio for nearly a week). But here are a few of the finished pictures of our new kitchen!

This is the granite tile we chose.

New microwave and cooktop

new dishwasher
north wall
old snack bar now more work space and storage!

Believe it or not, the pile of trash was bigger! The kids and Jeff had already hauled off one trailer load of it. The rotted board just to the right of the middle was the base of my sink cabinet.

I'll try to do some before and after pictures sometime this week, but for now I have some work to do!!

bottom cabinets and new floor

Well, blogger is having picture problems but I managed to upload one. Here are the bottom cabinets and the new floor.

Cookies

Girl Scout cookies are evil and must be destroyed!!

Kitchen Remodel, part 3

Just a few quick pictures of the work we did yesterday.

We got the walls all sanded and painted, then we decided at 9pm that we could put the wall cabinets in. Here is the north wall.
And the south wall. We put them really high, too. The old kitchen the cabinets were so low that I could barely put anything under them. NOW I won't have that problem. Since most of the Essary men are about 6'4" on average, we call this "Essary Height". LOL!

Even Drew decided he could do some of this work!

The floor guys are here now putting in the new linolium in the kitchen and the laundry room. No more Harvest Gold! I know Jeff will want to put in the base cabinets as soon as he can. But alas, he went to Shelby's basketball tourney in House and found himself having to coach the 5th-6th grade boys team! LOL!

Kitchen remodel, part 2

Ok, first off, Jeff built a new cabinet for the kitchen. And he did an awesome job! It was pretty darn close to what we already had. It has bookshelves on one end for all my cookbooks, too. Raising up the snack bar was very cool, it was workable surface. Which I didn't have before when it was table level high.

See, it looked pretty good. BUT we couldn't get the stains to match on it. Not only that, but we tried to restain the original cabinets. We took all the top doors down and stripped them, then restained one, and it was too dark. So, we sanded that down and restained again, and it ended up the exact color as before (which wasn't what was happening with the new cabinet).

So that was when we decided to get new cabinets.

That's me saying, "Oh. My. Gosh. I can't believe what we just did! No turning back now!!!"Yes, this is gross and disgusting. This is what it looked like underneath the sink cabinet. Eww!! We also discovered rotted subflooring that was very spongy.

And the other side of the kitchen with no cabinets. Big rat nest underneath this one. I don't think it says anything about my housekeeping skills. As I was cleaning it up, there was an old milk pickup slip from 1967 (this place used to be a dairy). So it was an OLD rat nest. Haven't seen the rat that lived there, though.

Since we had to tear out the section of subfloor, we had to get to it. And it was underneath 2 layers of linolium. It took alot of time with a hammer and crowbar getting it up.

And then a couple of sandpaper pads with the grinder. And a VERY dusty mess. Which settled on EVERYTHING.

And there were nails in the linolium. Not just the subfloor. The vinyl itself. That had to be sanded down (there were ALOT of them).


Here we had to tear out the rotted subfloor. And it came out in many, many little pieces. Many of them. And lots of nails.Once we finally got all those pieces out, we had to get every little piece of sawdust, nail, etc. out of there. That Dyson came in handy! Best vacuum I ever had, hands down.

Yay, we put a new floor in!! Nice and solid floor. We are so happy now we decided to tear out the cabinets. They weren't as well constructed as we had thought, and those around the sink were really rotten.



Last night we mudded everything. Today we painted (but I haven't taken any pictures yet). We ran out of paint. We were using what was leftover from doing the garage/now office and had enough for one coat. But decided that a second coat wouldn't hurt, so Jeff went to town to take care of that.

Tomorrow the new linolium is supposed to be installed. I'll have to move the washer and dryer out to the patio this afternoon I guess. And we hope to possibly install the upper cabinets tonight or tomorrow afternoon.

Of course, now we are getting into the busy part of the week. Shelby has a Little Dribblers basketball tourney in House, NM and has to be at the school by 6am to take the bus. Jeff will probably go with her and I'll stay here for the floor guys. Then Saturday both girls have a game in town for their city league team. Jeff has class all day. So it may be Sunday before we get to do the rest of the cabinets.

Stay tuned!!

We have had a few trials in the kitchen remodel. First Jeff built a new cabinet to match the old ones where the snack bar was. Then we started stripping the upper cabinet doors. Started to stain them and they were WAY too dark (we had tried a sample size of the stain and it was NOT the same as what we put on. I was pissed). Jeff tried to sand it off, but it still showed thru a little. Tried a much lighter stain and it was the SAME color as the cabinets before!

Then the wood he had made the new cabinet out of must have been different that the original. When I stained it, it came out totally different as well. So, nothing was matching up.

Sunday, Jeff decided to hell with it: let's get new cabinets.

Yesterday, that is what we did.

Today we gutted the kitchen. Completely. Fridge is in the new office. I have NO counters, NO cabinets. Everything is in boxes. We are eating off paper plates, and I got lots of frozen stuff today that can be nuked or baked (we still have oven, but no cooktop). Shopping in the frozen aisles was a new experience for me (other than WW meals).

As we tore out the cabinets, we discovered that the floor under the sink and dishwasher was nearly completely rotted out. So we have to fix that first. New floor comes in Friday.
Oh, and we decided to bite the bullet and do granite tile counters. Not the stuff he found the other day that I didn't like. We picked one out together and ordered it. Should be in by Monday. Very affordable. We cancelled the order on the laminate, and are probably spending as much on the tile as we did on those (of course, we still have to get concrete backerboard, bottom plyboard, the thinset and grout for the tile, and wood trim). But we felt it was a good investment for the value of the place.

The cabinets are in the barn, waiting to go in. Nice oak cabinets. No, not top of the line. Probably not middle of the line. But good enough for me. They have real oak doors and faces and are raised panels. I love them. And they fit our budget. Cool.

I have pictures, but don't feel like plugging the camera in to download them yet. Don't worry, ya'll will see soon enough.