Our Kitchen

So the kitchen is still not 100% finished. It will happen someday, but I figured I ought to just put some pictures up anyways.

There may be a few finishing touches that need to happen, but it is 100% nicer than it was before! The floor is marvelous and the walls are so pretty!

There is some decor that needs to go on the wall above the table there but I'm hesitant to put it up because it would mean putting nail holes in our nice paint job... ugh!

We didn't do anything with the cabinets or appliances but I think I'll get some knobs for the drawers and cupboards. They don't really bother me now but I remember when we first moved here always thinking, "How do they expect you to open these drawers!?"

Still a little short on storage space...

The light fixture over the sink is one of my favorite new additions. Before there was a fluorescent tube light that would turn on only if it felt like it and you asked really nicely. This new light is much brighter, happier and more compliant.

Hooray for tile!

The things we still need to do are:

• hang the wall art,
• put knobs on cupboards and drawers,
• put up the edgers that go along the small gap between cupboards and wall by the stove.
• put one piece of the door trim up and caulk and paint all the trim (including doors and windows), stain and nail in cabinet base quarter-round.

I am so grateful that we have a nice kitchen to use now! Took us long enough!

Kitchen Sneak Preview

I've been trying hard to wait until the kitchen is finished and cleaned up before I post pictures of it. BUT a) it is taking a long time, b) I'm getting impatient, and c) it is such a wonderful improvement I can hardly wait to share it (and use it).

We are now so close! We are working on baseboards and trim right now. After that, we need to do some caulking and touch-up painting and a little ceiling repair. Then once we've cleaned everything up and put stuff back where it goes, it will be ready! It sounds like a lot but I think it is just a week or two away, if we stick with it.

So for now we'll have to settle for this before and after sneak preview. I promise I'll get a picture of the whole kitchen when it's done.

Before:

After:

One Project Down (mostly)

Yesterday, Jeran worked and got our garden area mostly finished. It looks awesome. It was a pretty fun project. I always like the ones where we dig in the dirt and work with plants.

A before picture. This is how it looked when we moved here (for a while we had our motorcycle on the back patio under a tarp). There were some very nice flowers that died and didn't come back after a year of neglect so I dug them up to plant tomatoes.

I have wanted to do something with this garden area for a long time. When our home owner's association got a few bundles of landscape timbers and gave some to each homeowner, we decided it was time to make the change in our back garden.

We decided to use square pavers to extend the patio area a bit to give ourselves just a little more room between our patio and our new raised garden bed and somewhere to set the grill so it isn't in front of our window doors. For the garden itself, to maximize space and the short light we get due to the proximity to the house and trees, we decided to make it an L shaped bed off the corner of the patio.

Anyways, after weeks of planning and digging and waiting and working, it is mostly done!

There is still a little work and cleanup to do. This is before the excavated dirt from the pavers was filled in. We still need a little more dirt, but not as much as we expected, and the dirt we ended up with turned out to be slightly better quality that I expected. A lot of it was clay but we used as much of the solid clay to level under the paver base.

"After"

But that's not really the final product. The hardest part may yet to come, as we decide what to plant and make it something that is both pretty and functional. I'm thinking some flowers and some vegetables... but I'm totally undecided. Also, we plan to get something to sit on and probably bring our grill home from it's summer vacation in a little while. So it might look something more like this professional artist's rendition:

Next on the docket are more kitchen projects. Like that tile! It will happen someday soon and we won't be living with a bare concrete kitchen floor!

La Cocina

More kitchen updates. Sometimes it seems like that is all we do these days. Oh wait, it kind of has been. I have been getting really anxious to make some good progress on the kitchen because we haven't been able to really use it since we started sanding and mudding, and even very much during wallpaper removal. So from about mid-March until now, although the last week or two it has been even worse because we took the stove and microwave out. We've been eating PB & J and cereal and those get old pretty fast.

Jeran has quite a bit of painting and paint prep experience and knows what he is doing when it comes to walls. However, on Saturday, after a few days of prep, I was certain that we were never going to paint and that we would be doing mud-sand-mud-sand-mud-sand for the rest of our lives.

The mudding and sanding went on and on.

And on and on and on!

But finally we got to prime. Although priming is not generally a very exciting step, I was giddy about it because it meant the end of the prep work.

And paint! Now, for the record, Jeran wanted yellow and I wanted green and I gave in. I can't say I love the paint color, but I don't hate it and it is better than white or wallpaper. I expect it will grow on me over time - these things usually do.

And as a sneak peak of the next phase of the project, see the concrete floor in the last picture. We have tile to lay some time, but I'm ready for a little break. I didn't intend to tear up all the linoleum right away, but I started with the under the stove part (so we could put that back for now) and got carried away. I guess it will just be more motivation to get the tile done soon.

Woohoo! Now we can move most of the stuff back in and use the kitchen again! I keep thinking of all the wonderful things that I'm going to bake and cook! Cookies! Casserole! Grilled Cheese!

Last night as we were getting the stove put back in, it occurred to me that I should have made food in the crock pot. Dash it all! Why didn't I think of that sooner!

Kitchen Wallpaper

Well, I am about to embark on a big task: Taking down all the wallpaper in the kitchen. There is A LOT of it. There aren't too many cupboards in our kitchen but it is a big room, which leaves lots of area for wallpaper. Also, annoyingly, it goes behind the splash guard on the countertops for quite a ways.

Isn't it just too cute?

No. it is coming off - all of it - and I'm starting today. I did some test peeling on one edge a while ago and it is going to be more stubborn than the wallpaper we took off from the bathroom. I have done a little reading online to decide what is the best way to go about this.

I purchased a Paper Tiger, which will poke a lot of shallow little holes in the wallpaper (and if used right, not in the drywall) to allow liquid to get behind more than just the edges. You gently roll it around in an area, then spray/wipe/roll it with wallpaper adhesive remover and wait for a while with fingers crossed. Then, I think you are supposed to be able to just peel and scrape the loosened wallpaper off. I am just really really really hoping it is that simple.

Well, I've got my supplies, my iPod, and Toby for company, and I've delayed starting by writing this, so here goes nothing! I'll keep y'all posted!

♫ I've Got the Whole World...

on my floor. ♫

This was from quite a while back but I just now found the pictures on our less-used camera. I was laying on the floor and was somewhat bored or restless. I ended up creating artwork using the carpet by brushing the fibers in different directions. Here is the result:

Tada!

Toby-zilla!

This one is supposed to be Jeran.

Easter Activities

Happy Easter!

Jeran and I did two different things Saturday night for an Easter celebration, of sorts.

Jeran cleared everything out of our shed/storage area and built new, sturdier shelves. There was a lot of stuff in there! This took him all evening but the shelves are marvelous!

















After helping with the shelves a bit, I went to a little Easter egg-decorating party. It was great. There were dyes, pipe cleaners, googly eyes, fluff balls, markers, etc. to decorate eggs with. Everyone did something different; there was a judge, a rabbit, the earth, tourists, a future self- portrait, and others. I decided to do a duckling. Or a chick. Or some sort of bird. Here it is:

Jiggity Jig

We are home again now. It was a fun trip and VERY busy. It was great to see all the family and friends again. We made it up to the Beav and got both sunburned and sore but it was worth it. The snow was perfect and it was plenty warm without being melty. Andrew's wedding was fabulous and I am so happy for him and Lindsay. Anyhow, I'm supposed to be working now so I'll write more details later.

A Great Opportunity

Today I got to do something that you don't get to do very often. Some people don't even have opportunity to do this thing in their lifetime, and that is a shame because it was an exciting once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I got to smash a toilet with a hammer. It was awesome! Since we accidentally cracked the base of the toilet when remodeling our bathroom, we recently got a new toilet. After an unsuccessful trip to the dump today (they were closed - it's Saturday! geesh!), we decided to smash it into good sized chunks and just throw it in our garbage can. Hence the smashing. It makes me think of those places where people pay to go in and vent their anger by smashing everything and ripping the place apart. And to think, we got to do the funnest part fr free! (minus the cost of the new toilet)

I don't think we appreciate very often that our toilets are most often made of ceramic, the same material that those delicate figurines that always break are made of. Well, apart from being a lot thicker, it broke just like you might imagine those figures breaking if you took a tiny hammer to them. Yep. It was fun. I pity those who don't ever have the opportunity to intentionally destroy something permanent that we all use on a daily basis.

On a different note, we also went today to the nearby fire station for some suthun BBQ pork. Twice a year they host a BBQ dinner and we decided to go for the southern food experience. They had pulled pork BBQ, Beaufort stew, coleslaw and some little fried bread things that looked like little fingers. It's probably some southern food that no one else eats. All in all, I was not very impressed. I didn't like the BBQ! I only made it half way through the meat and I can honestly say I didn't enjoy it for a minute. The stew was pretty good and the coleslaw was typical. I still can't decide what to think of those little fried things. Probably because I don't know what to call them. Anyway, they tasted like onion rings but less good. I guess I will never turn into a good old southern girl after living here.

The missing water mystery

So for a while I have been trying to figure out why I have to keep refilling our two cat's water dish. It is a big one, the water cooler style so they always have water (or at least that is the idea). It is very convenient when we go away for a few days because we know they will have water for that long (before we got this I used to leave the toilet lid up, just in case). Anyhow, recently I have noticed the dish is completely empty very frequently. I finally found the cause. It was kind of funny. Hence the video:



The floor was obviously too wet for Diego's liking. And there was nothing in that dish BUT water. Yep. Toby is a crazy cat. I decided if he liked water so much I would put a little in the bathtub and give him a bath, which we have never done (cat's are so nice like that). That didn't go over so well, and while I didn't force the issue enough to get scratched, it didn't seem to have much effect on the water fascination. They have a regular water dish until the ground around it stays dry for at least a week.

This post makes me laugh, btw, because everyone else's blogs are full of pictures of their kids or whatever and this is about the same idea, just we just have cats... shrug. Also, please don't ask why I didn't notice that there were probably a few liters of water on the ground when the jug was empty. The answer is I don't know.