Final Kitchen Pics

The kitchen is quasi-finished!
We still have a few lights to hang, but all in all...we are done!
Can you believe it?

Check out that hood! Woohoo!

I still have to put some things on the shelves, but I have to find just the "right" items first.

Mmhmm. Still loving the sink.
Also, take a look at the tile while you are looking at this picture...that's good looking.

Just look at all that countertop! It's a beaut...

I just picked this little gem up. I love the way it looks on the wall.

Look! You too can spend money at IKEA and have organized drawers!
I love this more than I probably should.

The Lazy Susan for the pots and pans comes in a close second.
Maybe I love it the best.

Oooh wait. I love this DRAWER. It is so big and fun to open.
Maybe I love this one the best.

Just kidding. This drawer is a little more fun than everything else.
Look at all of the pot lids in here!!
Also...I can fit our waffle iron in here.
Seriously? It's a little more than I can handle.

I will not be sad to say good-bye to all the drywall dust, the little tiny screws everywhere, the five-thousand pounds of cardboard boxes, eating out every meal, the appliances on our porch.
It hasn't been too bad.
I would do it again in a heart beat.
In fact, we will gladly offer our IKEA expertise to anyone who is interested.

For a small Swedish Consulting Fee.

A Few of My Favorite Things

Since I now HAVE a new kitchen, I am now FILLING the new kitchen with little odds and ends that make it mine instead of IKEA's. I haven't gotten very far because well...buying actual food to put into the kitchen has a higher priority. But I have managed to find a few things that I really like and put a smile on my face:

Canisters filled with straws, cookies, candy necklaces, gumballs, animal crackers and bag clips.

School clock.
The first day we had it up Asher was asking me over and over again when dinner was.
I told him, "When the little hand is on the six."
Time telling is just around the corner!

Apple and Pear salt and pepper shakers. They are the cutest things you have ever seen.
I couldn't leave them in the store. They had to come home with me.

They are also tiny.
For scale purposes, you can see how small they are next to a sippy cup.
So, I guess I will be refilling them often.
I might have just found the reason they were in the antique store.

Hopefully, we will have a hood for our stove going up this weekend!
Woohoo!

Real Quickly

Yes, Matt and Ben did fix the leak in the kitchen sink yesterday morning and I was able to move EVERYTHING into the kitchen last night.

It is amazing.

Now, we are onto clean up, install the hood, and decorate! Woohoo!

Everything and the Kitchen Sink

mmmhmmm. back off ladies. This one's mine.

But this one? Totally available.
Leave a comment here or at blogofthejohnson.com
You can get a date any time. Seriously.

That's my freakin' sink. Yes there is a little teeny eensy leak.
No biggie. It's just that Lowes closes at 8 on Sundays.
Not at 3am.

What A Difference a Weekend Makes

Maybe if you will remember back in May when my kitchen looked like this:



And then on Thursday it looked like this:




And then on Saturday it looked like this!


And tonight...


TONIGHT, well this morning...it is 12:54am and...


Matt and Ben are attempting to still hook up the sink to the disposal. They have been working on the dishwasher and the sink for 12 straight hours right now.

Ugh. For them.
I got to go IKEA again today because during cabinet installation, one of the doors fell from a height of seven feet straight onto the tile. I did my best to break the fall but there wasn't much I could do. I did manage to return about $70 of other stuff that we over bought so that was a bonus.

Also, the kids got to play for the first time in the kids "Smailand" at IKEA and immediately asked if we could ever go back to IKEA. Ummm, let's see...hopefully not anytime soon.

Now all that is left to do on the punch list:
Install all of the hardware on the cabinets
venting the A/C under one cabinet
install hood over stove
level stove
toe kicks
tile backsplash (maybe) and tile behind sink
finish up paint
touch up countertop sealer
caulk sink
level all doors and drawers
install organizers in cabinets
window treatments
transition strip
decorate!
clean the entire house including getting the carpets cleaned.

Umm. Yeah. So, I am sure that I missing about a million and one half things. Those are just the things that I can think of.
But cleaning my house and moving my kitchen back into my kitchen? I can not wait. We are so so so so close.
Tonight, I spot cleaned the grout spots off the carpet from when it got taken all throughout the upstairs about three weeks ago. Miraculously it all came up.

Anyone want to come clean carpets with me? When that happens...this project will be done. Officially.
Maybe.


Edit: I just got up for the morning, and learned that Matt was up half the night trying to solve the kitchen sink.
Apparently, we installed the bar initially on the wrong "holes" and had to take the entire sink off of the counter after he and Ben had gotten all of the plumbing correct with no leaks or anything at 1:30am.
We went to install the doors and learned of the wrong installation and had to start over. I went to bed at 3am and they were still at it.
I just read Matt's blog and he says there is a slow leak in the kitchen sink.
Good to know. Since I just used it.

Scurvy

Supposedly we are getting appliances delivered today.

I sure hope so. With all of the eating out we are doing AND anticipating the arrival of the appliances, coupled with spending ALL of our money on actually renovating the kitchen...it has been quite a while since we have eaten properly.

Any idea how long it actually takes for scurvy to set in?
I'm not sure, but since we have been eating camp food all summer, followed up with a steady diet of Little Caesars, Bojangles, Zaxby's, Jersey Mikes and moe's...I believe scurvy is in fact knocking on the door of our little house.



Let's hope for a fridge, stove, and dishwasher to be delivered today.
Then let's hope that all of them can be CONNECTED today as well.

Then, let's hope for a sink to be installed sometime in the near future.
That requires our countertops to be finished. Maybe by Friday.
So maybe a sink by Saturday?
Maybe?

The Twin Towers

In the middle of our kitchen, we have installed two pantry cabinets.

At IKEA, you can select a 15" wide cabinet or a 24" wide cabinet. Thanks to the length of our wall, it made more sense to go with the 24" wide cabinets. That would be TWO, two feet wide cabinets. Four feet of pantry space.

Then we decided to not just go with your standard 30" tall cabinets, but 39" DRAMATIC cabinets. Because my husband is 6"4, he can hide all kinds of things on the tallest of shelves and I will never, ever, never see them. What that translates into for the pantry cabinets is 88" tall cabinets. Two of them.

That is Seven FEET Four Inches Tall. Two of them.
The fridge is going to go in between them.
On the island of Sodor. Oh wait, that's from Thomas the Train, not Lord of the Rings. The children have eaten my brain again.




And they are going to walk around with all of the little people and provide them with food and cleaning supplies. And the world will smile again.

Making Progress

Kitchen progress is being made!
Every night I go to bed with a mental checklist of how many days I am thinking realistically it might be until I have a refrigerator in its place making ice. And a stove with its oven operational and cups in a cupboard. And SINK! A glorious sink! Oh the thought of having a kitchen sink. It is too much.

The hopeful person in me is thinking all of these things COULD happen by next weekend. That we could have appliances delivered to our house by Tuesday of next week and we spend the rest of the week hooking everything up and finishing.

Hopeful.
Realist? I don't know. Every day holds its own little hiccups.
Like last night we went to build cabinets and found out that we are STILL missing two from the great flood of 2009. So, I get to go back to IKEA on Friday instead of helping to install cabinets.

Blurgh.
But if you want to see the progress that is being made, here are some pictures:

Before tile and just primer on the wall.

Look! Tile! and PAINT!

ooooh. Grout is going to go in here today. Can you believe my husband can do all this?

Also, you can follow my husbands thoughts on the whole dadgum thing on his blog, mightybignoggin.blogspot.com. Yes, he has a blog. And he is using my pictures.

God Bless Jeannie

My sweet sister-in-law Jeannie read my blog yesterday, called her husband and my mother-in-law and organized a hijacking of my kids for a few days so that we could get more of our kitchen out of the way, organized for the summer and clear work out of the way.

I could kiss her on the lips for what she has given to me.
Already today, I have mostly packed the kids for Colorado...been to Target and Old Navy (by myself-which is SUCH A LUXURY) and visited a tile showroom; got intimidated and left.

Quite an accomplished day by 1pm.
Left to do today?
Some contact work for YL, demolish the rest of the kitchen, some work for the ad agency and a date with the hubba hubba good time (which will include more tile showrooms).

Jeannie, I love you but since you have three kids...I probably can never repay you. That intimidates the crap out of me.
But I can take LOTS of pictures for you.

Kitchen Renovation Diary 1

The classic before picture:



Tons of stuff on the counters just because we really weren't planning on ripping out a kitchen this past weekend. But, we had a dumpster delivered on Friday morning and now it is Monday morning and 80% full. We hope to have the rest of the kitchen ripped out by the end of this week.

Ben and Matt started attacking the kitchen at 3:45pm...




This is what the kitchen looked like at 5:45pm.


Warning, don't let these men into your house unless you want it beasted.


They spent all day yesterday taking apart a heating and air conditioning vent that stands in the way of our new cabinets and rerouting it. They actually put a new vent in where there wasn't one before!
Both men were beaming like they had just birthed a child all night long.




It was impressive. I am VERY impressed. Mostly because I don't have to pay an air conditioning guy to come and do the same thing.



We have lots of actual work to do this week and so we have to take a few days off the kitchen renovation. But later in the week, we hope to rip out the rest of the kitchen, solve some plumbing questions, take up the flooring, take out the rest of the framing and install the new electric. And if we are really good, new drywall! Not too ambitious is it?

Total tools bought this weekend:
Cordless Sawzall
18volt cordless screwdriver
jigsaw
work spotlights

Wanna know what I say to that? Happy Father's Day!

Still Shouting Out to Ikea

Well the damage is minimal, thanks to the fact that you buy each individual item from IKEA when you buy a cabinet.

If this had happened with Home Depot, we would be buying new custom made whole cabinets with hardware, shelves and everything. As it is with IKEA, we only have to buy the frame of five cabinets. So the damage is minimized.

Whew.

But we did realize that we have a MAJOR problem on our hands with the water in the basement as it turns out the water came in from the walls and not through another entrance. Fun! More renovations that cost an ARM AND A LEG. Anyone have spare ones laying around? We are using ours on a kitchen.

But we have surveyed the damage and decided that since the cabinets are all out of boxes and mixed up and in order to get organized outside of the basement since it is supposed to rain the next two days...we are going to GO AHEAD AND START RENOVATIONS NOW. mmhmm.

Not later like we planned. This ought to be interesting. We are playing the hand we are dealt. With smiles and calm demeanors. Seriously.

Here we go!

Sanfu #1 of 85670

Matt and I got to have an IKEA date on Wednesday and ended up BUYING our IKEA kitchen. It was a nerve wracking experience to say the least...
to make double sure of all the measurements, the cabinet choices, the countertops etc. It was entirely too overwhelming to take too much advantage of the sale, because we weren't totally prepared for the purchase. Like we didn't know what drawer organizers we wanted or what faucet exactly would be right. But the big stuff? We got ALL the big stuff out of the way.

We ordered 20 cabinets, countertops, hood and sink. We sort of freaked about getting it all back home but thankfully they offer home delivery since they are in state for only $99 and so we took them up on it.
It was about 9:30 when we finished up and set up the home delivery. The customer service rep was extremely vague on what we had to do next but he kept saying we had to "check it all out" which to us meant that we had to make sure that all the items were there before they got loaded.

We were not excited to have to wait around IKEA until 10:30pm to check and make sure all 16 boxes of drawer slides were there.

After 30 minutes of waiting, the warehouse people told us that they triple check everything and we could just go on home. "No need to worry!" they said. We wiped our brows from the effort of waiting and went home.




Today we accepted the delivery of our new IKEA kitchen. Yes, this is it.

MINUS 40 ITEMS.

Things that would be easy to overlook too:
Like nine foot long sections of countertops.
And a double sink.

My favorite part of the day was the delivery man showing me the invoice where everything was checked off. He told me "It must be in a box or something."

Like you put a sink together. Out of a flat box of MDF.
I mean, IKEA is good. But not that good.

Also, he didn't want to go back over the list and make sure that everything was there. All I noticed that was missing was the sink.
I asked him if we could go over the inventory and he said,
"Ma'am, there are 145 items here. We checked it all in our warehouse. I have to be on the other side of town in 30 minutes. If we can through it in 15 minutes, then I can help you out."

Ummm. What?
I don't really care where you have to be.
I HAVE A KITCHEN IN 145 BOXES. Let's go ahead and check it out, kay?

I know that picture is overwhelming.
Imagine what it is going to look like when 40 more things get delivered.
Truthfully, I thought it was going to be worse.

Please ignore all the crap in the background.
Thanks.

Yes we are insane

One of the reasons why our life has been pure chaos for the past week has been because we have had to make a lot of decisions about whether or not to engage in a kitchen renovation this summer.

You see, a Home Depot cabinet sale ended on Sunday. So we needed to make a decision on our kitchen and either order the frickin' cabinets or move on. So lots of debates and whathaveyou had us paying a babysitter so we could go and sit with a designer again and have her rework our design on Friday night. We got really excited until she came back with it costing another $1,000 more than the previous design. Yikes.

So we came home. And opened the IKEA kitchen catalog.
And came up with a design based on the one we just had done at Home Depot.
For 1/2 the cost. But for about 150 times the headache.
Guess who's buying a headache for the summer?

Here's how the debate goes:
What do you have more of, time or money?
Sometimes you have more money.
Sometimes you have more time.

Apparently we have more time. For now.
I was really sad that we made this decision on Saturday though because a HUGE IKEA Kitchen sale ended on Sunday. One that has been going on since March. Ugh. But guess what I just got in my inbox? The IKEA kitchen sale has been extended until Sunday, May 10th!
So I guess we are heading to Charlotte sometime in the next four days to BUY A FREAKING KITCHEN IN BOXES. Seriously. Or some would call it a divorce in a box. I am choosing to not think about it in those terms and I am keeping my eyes on the prize.

THIS.

Which is what I hope my kitchen will look like sometime in the next five years.

Yep, that is Lucy in the picture and yes, those are the cabinets we are buying. But we ordered stainless appliances and we will not have a bar. Do your best to imagine away!