My kitchen!

If you want pictures, talk to Pete

As you can see, Peter posted some fairly recent pictures of our cupboard progress last night. It's even changed since those pictures were taken, as we now have our dishwasher in place and the sink cupboard beside it (the dishwasher sits beside the part of the cupboard that is stained, and the sink cupboard sits on the other side of that).

I went and picked out the countertop today and ordered it, while Peter met with a carpenter who's going to install it for us. He'll do all the corners and cutting out which will be great. He also said he can put the seam (grrr for 12' lengths) in the stove section so that there's only a small length of seam on the backsplash and at the very front. So ... our countertop should be in the store around Feb. 14th - how romantic ;) with installation to follow sometime after that. Now we'll be scrambling to get everything else finished.

Lest you think we've been idle, last night Peter finished the cupboard with the sink, and I laid the rest of the tiles in the master bathroom. Not bad for an evening's work, and we still had time to watch 24 before heading to bed.

The rest of the evenings this week are busy, so Friday is the next time we'll be able to work on the house. So, the goals for the weekend are:

1. Grout the master bathroom
   
2. Hang remaining drywall in master bath
   
3. Crack-fill one coat on each bathroom
4. Lay tile in half-bath (??)

In order to do this, since obviously you can't hang drywall or crack-fill in a room that has recently had its floor worked on, we will try to: Friday night hang drywall and crack-fill one coat on ceilings of each room. Saturday morning we will crack-fill walls in half-bath. Saturday afternoon we will: crack-fill walls in master bath and lay tiles in half bath. As soon as crack-filling is done in master bath we can grout those tiles. We'll see how well that schedule sticks ;)

So we have all of our cupboards in place and are awaiting a quote for a counter top. As you can see, Ange is very happy. Our cats are also enjoying the cupboards. Shver is testing out her balance in the picture above.

We learned the hard way that it is far better to scrape the excess glue away then try to sand it off latter

A productive night

Last night was a housework night, and we almost completed our list - that's a miracle in itself! I finished cutting most of the rest of the tile for the master bathroom (the last few will have to wait until we have the door in place), Peter put together the last major piece of face frames, and we attached one more back onto the cabinets. Tonight we're busy, so our next chance to work is tomorrow night.

Let's see ... the goals for tomorrow night will be:

1. Attach the last back to the second corner cabinet section.
   
2. Attach that section to its base.
3. Build the base for under the sink cabinet.
4. Put together the last face frame section (for the first corner cabinet) and attach
   
5. Lightly sand the first corner cabinet
6. Sand the second corner cabinet

We'll see how we make out. I went to take some pictures and realized there really isn't much to show. Hopefully soon we'll have some new flooring and the cabinets will all be in place (and some of them stained) so I can get some more interesting pictures.

On a more upbeat note ...

I didn't like looking at the title of my last post when I logged on. It seemed like too much of a downer!

Another weekend has passed, and we did well with keeping on track. Friday night we had a minor setback, as one of the boxes had warped a bit, and wouldn't pull together with the screws we had been planning on using. So ... what do you do when all else fails? Use lots of glue of course! Peter spread glue over the whole side of the cupboard and then we clamped them together overnight (it seems to have worked ...). Peter also jointed and planed several more boards for the face frames on Friday night while I cut out the two tiles to go around the toilet pipe in the main bath. They look pretty good if I do say so myself!

Saturday we got another back on a corner cabinet, we finished planing the boards for the face frames, put together another set of face frames, and I sanded the glue off one of the corner cupboards.

I was looking back over our goals for January and we'd better pick up the pace! They're still possible, so it would be great if we could accomplish them. Tonight and Wednesday we're busy, but the rest of the evenings and weekend should be good to go.

My goals for the week:
- Finish assembling the base cabinets including face frames.
- Finish laying tile in master bath
- Finish sanding and staining corner cupboards
- Post some pictures ;)

Will it ever end?

I had a time of discouragement yesterday, where I started feeling like this construction process is never going to end. It doesn't happen often, but when it does, these feelings of hopelessness aren't much fun. I'm mostly over that today and anxious to get back to work :)

Last weekend Peter routed the backs of the cabinet boxes in order to easily install the backs (not cut out yet - that will be this weekend). I spent some time cutting some of the more ... interesting ... tile squares that need to go in our bathroom. These are the tiles around the pipes. Thanks to Dad for the use of his wet saw - I'm a pro now for when you want to lay some tile in your house. I still have a few more tiles to cut, and hopefully I'll get them laid shortly. It will be nice to finish the flooring in another room of the house.

Peter and I are both busy tonight. Tomorrow night will be devoted to cutting out the back panels for the cupboards. Friday night I'm busy for a couple of hours, but we should hopefully be able to get the backs done by the end of the evening. Then on Saturday we're back to the jointer / planer combo (otherwise known as major sawdust creators!) to get the wood ready for the last few face frames.

I know I've been saying this for a while, but it really does look like we'll be ready to order the countertop early next week ;) My time estimates haven't been that wrong, it's just that we needed to have the cabinets closer to "finished" than I thought we did in order to take measurements for the countertop. So ... by this time next week we should be talking countertop colours, and then the mad dash to finish (stain and varnish) the cupboards is on to beat the arrival of the countertop (takes 2 weeks from order to delivery).

Picture update

I gave Peter a new camera for Christmas, and this is a picture he took overlooking our backyard Christmas morning. Talk about picturesque!














The two pictures above are our kitchen cabinets as they stand right now. The picture on the left shows the part of the cupboards that will jut out into the room, facing the front of the house. It will house my kitchen sink and a bank of drawers. I can't wait!

The picture on the right shows an overview of the rest of the base cabinets. Peter is working on the face frames at the table. We should get most of them attached by the end of the weekend.



This is one picture of our entranceway floor after it's been grouted and cleaned :) Blogger seems to have eaten my next picture, so I'll have to put that in a separat post. You can also kind of see that the floor past the entryway is grouted and cleaned as well - that's 15 hours (at least) on my hands and knees!

I feel like I'm living in a barn!

Peter has been using his jointer and planer to create the face frames for the cupboards over the past few days - man do they create sawdust! We've probably cleaned up 5 big garbage bags full in the last 2 days, and that's not all of it!

Sorry about the lack of updating, but there really wasn't much progress in December - Christmas stuff got in the way. The last week has been great, though. Peter finished up the boxes for the base cabinets, and I cleaned and grouted most of the rest of the tile we have laid downstairs - very exciting! It still needs to be washed a few times before it's picture-ready, but I'll get one when it is. Oh, and I also finished insulating around the windows and doors.

Our first Christmas in the new house was really nice. We drove past our apartment the other day, and it seems like a lifetime ago that we were there! On New Year's Eve I was remembering that last year at this time we were getting ready to start clearing the lot - what a change! It's pretty cool when I think of it that way. It's so easy to get bogged down in the slow progress of each day. Our New Year's resolution ... to finish the house of course ;)

Our goals for this week are:

• Finish grouting tile downstairs (whatever is laid)
• Have base cabinets put together (i.e. face frame and bottom frame attached)

If we can get that done we'll be in good shape.

Our goals for the month are:

• Finish tiling master bathroom
• Tile half-bath downstairs
• Finish cupboards
• Order countertop

Guess I'd better get off the computer and back to housework! lol