Days 47-51: Kitchen, paint and unpacking.

Though we have been living in our not-so-ugly house for almost a month, we hadn’t really done much unpacking. We’ve been able to get away with it since all the boxes have been in our “storage” (an addition that we are going to demo) and not cluttering our house. Most of what hadn’t been unpacked was our kitchen belongings and, well, we didn’t have a kitchen! That is until Trent nearly finished it on Saturday! Ladies and gentlemen, we now have a refrigerator with running water, a working stove, an installed dishwasher and cabinets! If you have these things in your kitchen you should feel very thankful! Nearly a month of cooking in the microwave and hand washing dishes has made me appreciate these things that I always took for granted. The only important missing pieces of our kitchen puzzle is the sink and countertops. Luckily we have our handy utility sink close to the kitchen, and a few boards that we are using as makeshift countertops.

As soon as Trent finished installing the cabinets and drawers he began working on installing the knobs and pulls on doors and drawers. Our last house did not have knobs and pulls and we never thought twice about it. Ikea kitchens MUST have hardware installed in order to easily open doors and drawers. At a glance hardware installation seems easy, but when I thought about it for a second I realized it involves lots of measuring. Something I am not good at. Also, you only get one chance. If you drill a hole in the wrong spot you ruin the door. Lucky for me, Trent took on this responsibility much like the rest of the projects in the house :). He brilliantly made a template so that he didn’t have to measure every time he was going to drill holes.

The three different sets of holes work for our three different drawer sizes. Since he had the template he only had to measure to find the middle of the drawer each time. He made a similar template for the cabinet doors. Between the template and Conleigh’s help, he was able to knock this project out quick!

Look how far this kitchen has come!

Did you notice our pretty dishwasher? Probably not. That’s because it’s a hidden dishwasher! It comes looking like this:

And looks like this a few hours later:

Voila! I think the dishwasher install was probably Trent’s least favorite portion of the kitchen install. It sure is pretty though!

I finally got ahold of the chalk paint that I needed and finished my bookshelf project.

I also painted our French door to match our front door. French Linen chalk paint seemed appropriate for our French door :).

In other news, we had to fire our pool man after we received a $200.00 bill for 2 cleanings. Subsequently, our sparkling blue pool turned green…

Trent visited Leslie’s Pool Supply and got schooled on DIY pool maintenance. He played pool boy on Sunday so it looking a little less sick. With a little more TLC, I’m sure it will be sparkly in no time!

Since the kitchen is pretty much on hold until we get our countertops, our biggest upcoming project is demoing the addition/storage. With that being said, I better get back to emptying it out…