The Kitchen

So, here's a reminder of the cupboard I bought from the town:



Now, given the relative tinyness of my kitchen, I needed more storage space. Note all the nice empty space above the cupboard. So, when I saw these pieces of wood in the garage, left by the previous owner, I got an idea:



I cut them down to the length I needed and painted them with the same paint I used on the cabinets:



And now, I have more storage space! Also you can see the almost completed cabinet:



And here, my completed kitchen, which I LOVE:













There is now a roman shade on the kitchen window, and the table has been removed from the kitchen to leave an open space, since I'm still not sure exactly what I want to do there. Eventually I'd like to replace the top on the cabinet under the shelving so that it extends out on at least one side so someone could sit there and use the top of the cabinet as a table. I originally wasn't overly fond of the pots hanging over the sink, but they've grown on me, and they're very convenient and let me get more stuff in the cabinets.

Next step, painting the basement (that would be S's little project - paint was purchased today!) and the dining room. I'm still debating on colours for the dining room, but will probably go with a neutral taupe of some sort. It has to go with the yellow of the kitchen since there's one shared wall that will be half yellow, half whatever colour I paint the dining room. I'll probably try and find a piece of molding or something to put over the paint line and help visually divide the two spaces. Also I want to get some molding to put around the edges of the shelves I added in the kitchen since the wood is pressboard and the edges are pretty rough.

Oh, and most of the trim in the kitchen is still blue or unpainted, and I need to paint it white. But that involves taking the blinds off of the sliding door, and so far I haven't felt like doing it.

But the kitchen is basically done and it's pretty and it's functional and I'm happy, happy, happy!

Progress, YAY!

I'm feeling a bit less like we'll never, ever get unpacked, and a little more hopeful that soon we won't be dodging boxes and assorted debris wherever we go in the house.

Mostly because we managed, thanks to putting in a new closet system, to get the master bedroom organized.

Before:



Scary! Ahhhhhhhh!



New closet organizer. Ohhhhhhh, spiffy!





And now the room is (mostly) clean. There's a few things that need to be dealt with on the dressers. Also I'm too lazy to stage it all properly for the photos.





I also picked up the cabinet I won from a town auction (Hi Marie!):



Just a teaser - you'll see in the next entry what I'm doing with it! Let's just say the cabinet plus some other ideas are going to dramatically increase the storage space in my kitchen...

Buried in boxes

Unforgiveable, the lack of posting, really.

But there's just so much to do! I really don't understand how all the stuff we had crammed in the apartment has somehow expanded to completely fill a house twice the size. Is there a law of physics that governs moving? Stuff always expands to fill the space available, something like that?

The kitchen is close to being done. One side is finished, the other is about 60% done. I'm hoping to get it complete tomorrow, but there's a fair amount of painting to do.

Here's what the original kitchen looked like:



And here's what the cabinets look like painted with new hardware:



I'm so happy with how it's turning out - nicer than I really could have imagined. The only issue is the lack of space, but I have some ideas for additional storage that may work out...

We're going to replace the crappy closet system in our room with a decent rod and shelf system. The existing one is terrible - you basically have to hang things up one item at a time, and it's very annoying. The room is a total disaster because we haven't had a chance to put up any additional shelving yet either, so there's nowhere to put any of the 8 zillion t-shirts we own (why do we have so many t-shirts??).

The basement is a disaster area, but we did find someone to take the chest freezer away, so hopefully once we have unimpeded access to our crawl space we can stuff all the crap into storage and forget about it. And the spare room needs work too. AUGH.

Two rooms DONE!

And the master bedroom is done, done done!

Well, except for the threshold, but I haven't figured out how to do that yet, and it can wait.

A few photos of laying the floor:







After putting the closet doors back up and installing and painting the quarter round:





So, that's satisfying. Next up is working on the kitchen and cleaning the carpets. The goal is to get half of the cupboards done before we move in on Saturday so we have somewhere to store things, and it looks like we'll do it. Here are the cabinets with the doors off and two coats of the new paint on:



Here's what I faced in preparing them - horrible shelf paper, ewwwwwww. It peeled right off, thank goodness, but left a bit of a sticky mess behind.



Most of the cabinets and doors have only had one coat of paint (the ones above were my test cabinets to see how they'd look), so there's lots more painting to do. The doors need some work too, since there are holes that need to be filled on the lower doors so the new handles will fit properly and the holes won't show.

And the paint is oil based, so it's stinky and clean up is a pain. But it looks really good once it's dried, so it's worth the effort!