Let me catch you up on what happened the past two months. First the floors got stained. They are beautiful and by far this was the easiest part of the renovation. We had wonderful floor guys who showed up when they said they would and finished the job a day or two early- it was a nice change!
Next up, Ben and I spent some quality time assembling our cabinets. My dad practically had a heart attack when he saw all the boxes from Ikea. He hates assembling Ikea cabinets. In fact the day he came to assemble, I think disappeared after about an hour and went to trim tress (his real love!). Ben also was not good at understanding the Ikea directions, so that left me as the interpreter. Assembling the cabinets was pretty easy. If you are ever going to assemble/install Ikea cabinets, have no fear you can do it. I am going to do another post with tips for Ikea Kitchen dreamers. Assembling the cabinets was overall easy, once you do one, they are all basically the same.
Then it was cabinet install day. I brought in the big guns for this install, Ben, my dad, my uncle and my brother in law. I spent the day running to get things from the store, making food, and hanging out with my niece having tea parties. It was a very long day and at times frustrating. I left Ben in charge of the instructions and obviously I hadn't taught him how to read the plans well enough so at one point we had to backtrack and take down about 4 cabinets to install the cover panels. I think my husband wanted to kill me when I pointed this out. Also, we did not plan ahead to leave enough clearance on the top of the cabinets for the trim I wanted to install, so we had to use a different one instead, which required yet another trip to Ikea. There were little hiccups with the cabinets but looking back it all seems pretty minor.
The next big project for me was assembling the drawers for our cabinets. All of our lower cabinets are pull out drawers, so this was a large undertaking. It went pretty smooth until we go to the last two, Ben and I each assembled a drawer incorrectly, which took us 30 minutes and a few YouTube videos to figure out how to take apart the drawer to remake it.
We ordered the counter tops which were supposed to take 3 weeks to come in, they took 5 weeks which was stressing me out because we had promised ourselves we would be done with this project by June 1. Luckily the counter tops went in the last week of May and the plumber was able to come hook up the water the Friday before Memorial day weekend. I had a really terrible idea of running the dishwasher on Friday before we left for the cabin which led to a discovery that the pipes were clogged and the dishwasher drained into the sink. Ben tried to fix it for 3 hours before I decided we were abandoning ship to head to the cabin for a break, on our way to the cabin we set up for the plumber to come back on Tuesday to fix the problem. We got lucky it is was an easy fix, and now the kitchen is working like a dream.
The most fun part for me? Organizing. Ikea has all of these awesome bins/dividers/organizers to keep things looking good in the new cabinets. I spent a couple hundred dollars on organizers, which seems insane but now the kitchen is super functional. My best friend came over and spent a few hours with me helping me decide where to put everything and keeping me focused. It was a little overwhelming but I am glad she was there to keep me focused.
Here are some pictures of the process.....
 |
| The finished floors |
 |
| The end of day of 1 of install |
 |
| The end of day 2 of install |
 |
| The masterminds working on the trim! |
 |
| The cabinets without countertops |
 |
| Ta-daa! A finished kitchen |
 |
| I love our new sink! I don't have a good pic with the faucet installed. |
 |
| Drawer organizers |
 |
| I love having drawers for everything, so easy to find things! |
More updates to come, sometime soon but I make no promises because I spent last summer preparing to move, this summer I plan on spending plenty of time playing!
Cheers,
A
