i solemnly swear this is the last post i will write about our DIY kitchen renovation

Well, the kitchen is finished.

After 8 months.

35 weekends.

Hundreds of trips to Lowe's.

1 trip to Urgent Care for a tetanus shot.

4 weeks of meals made using only the toaster oven and an old microwave in our upstairs storage room.

Hundreds (thousands?) of hours.

2 rounds of painting.

Lots of This Old House videos on Youtube.

4 times when I said we should just put the house up for sale "as is" and abandon ship.

And literal blood, sweat, and tears.

Let's take a look down memory lane.  Here's the original kitchen:

We started ripping it out in September.  At the time, I was HORRIFIED by this "mess."  Oh, sweet, naive September Laura.  It was going to get so much worse and I had no idea.  Which was probably good.  Because had I known what was to come, I may have changed my mind!

And then came the wallpaper removal.  Which was so impossible that we just ripped all of the drywall down and put new stuff up.  I had NO IDEA how much dust drywall work created.  But I learned.  Quickly.  We also found the old OLD wallpaper.

There was so much coffee.

SO, MUCH. COFFEE.  No matter what the state of the kitchen was on any given day, the coffee maker was the one thing that we made sure ALWAYS worked.

There was the day that Matt and his dad and brother replaced the wall air conditioner.  And there was a hole in our house.  And my father-in-law kept saying, "Don't worry! If we can't get the new unit in, we will just turn this hole into a window!"

I spent the day ignoring my nervousness about the whole thing by singing Adele's "Hello From the Other Side" to Matt, who was outside, over and over.

Even during the worst of the construction we ate dinner together in the dining room every night.  Sometimes our plates were surrounded by tool cases and packs of shims and boxes of nails, and, in Matt's case, a can of Raid.

And then, there was the day that the truck came and delivered boxes upon boxes upon boxes of cabinets.

We moved the dining room table against the wall and were so confident that surely all of the boxes would fit in there.  Oh, how wrong we were.  They filled the entire dining room, family room, and much of the living room.  

The pantry was too tall to fit in any other room but the kitchen.

To me, this was the worst part.  I knew the kitchen would be messy.  But having the entire rest of the living area crowded and cluttered too was not my favorite.  However, nothing would stop me from having a Christmas tree!

We spent a whole weekend sanding the ceiling, and then decided to call in the professionals.  It was so dusty.  We had an exhaust fan in the window, and after day 1, this was the state of the window screen.  It simultaneously made me laugh, and want to cry.

The demolition took a long time, and there was a LOT of behind the scenes work before we could get to the fun stuff.

We laid the new floor.

And then finally, it was time for cabinets!  Matt took vacation time the first week of November and he put up these cabinets.  Among many other things.  He would wake up at 6:30 every morning and start working, and work until 10 at night.  By the end of the week I was becoming genuinely concerned for him! He is always a hard worker but I'd never seen him so exhausted.

My father-in-law helped Matt with the gas line.  I always get a little nervous when I hear him say, "You guys have good homeowner's insurance, right?"

Then it was onto the island, which included some complicated plumbing work and lots of measuring to make sure it was straight, and level.

After a few weeks of plywood counters, the counter tops for the cooking side and the island were installed!

We ripped out the cabinets on the other side, and then we had to expand the doorway into the kitchen because the corner cabinet was too big to fit through the door.  So, that was fun.  But eventually, success!

We forged ahead.

Sink time!

We finally finished up the last of the drywall on this wall.

And then it was time to pick paint colors.  I spent about 48 hours set on painting the whole kitchen navy.

And then decided to go with a lighter blue.  I don't know what happened when I picked up the paint, but it was the wrong color and our kitchen was smurf blue.  I may have cried.  I totally cried.

I went back and got a lighter shade, took a vacation day, and repainted it the whole thing.

 

We put up the back splash, got the table delivered, and now here we are.

The delivery company only brought 3 chairs (we ordered 4), and we still need decorations and curtains and a light over the table, but we are basically done.

And I am so happy.

I may never leave that room.

Matt gets TONS of credit.  He worked so hard and did an excellent job.  So much research and attention to detail and precision and hard work went into every bit of it.  We hired someone to repair the ceiling, and obviously the counter tops were delivered, but other than that he did everything himself.

There's not one single thing I would change and I am not exaggerating when I say that I smile every time I walk into the room.  I look forward to so many more years and meals and laughs and memories in that kitchen.

my car is like a cat. it has nine lives.

Growing up, we lived a few miles from a busy naval air base.  Our house was in the flight path, so airplanes and helicopters and fighter jets flew over the house all the time.  My dad and brother knew the sounds of the different planes, and I can distinctly remember the two of them leaping up and running outside when they heard cool planes to watch them fly over the house.  It's one thing to hear a passenger plane or news helicopter fly overhead, but it's quite another to hear a fighter jet ripping through the sky, shaking the windows in the house and the glasses in the cabinets, the sound lingering long after the jet had flown out of sight.

The base had a huge air show each September, which meant the Blue Angels and the Stealth Bomber even flew over our house a time or two.   We thought the Stealth Bomber was so cool because it was, well, stealthy.

Tonight at dinner Matt and I were talking about the base.  He grew up in the same town, with the same beloved background noise of F-15's and A-10's, and I asked him if he would run outside to watch the planes fly over too.  He said very matter of factly, "Of course.  You ALWAYS go outside when you hear cool planes."

The base had a parking lot where you could park your car and sit and watch the planes.  My dad would take my brother and me up there and we would watch the pilots do touch and go's, or hope to see a cool one come in for a landing.  Sadly, after 9/11, they closed the observation lot, and the gates that used to be open were suddenly armed with men holding machine guns.  The base closed completely a few years later.

Anyway the point in sharing this long background story is that when I've been driving my car for the last many, many thousands of miles, it sounded like one of the loud, choppy helicopters at the base.

I've even seen neighbors run out onto their front lawns when they hear me driving by.

(Just kidding.)

But I was a helicopter who wanted to be a Stealth.

Thanks to an engine mount that had seen better years, I've been barreling down roadways all over southeastern Pennsylvania for the better part of a year, shaking all the way.  I've gotten used to the shaking and the noise, but for a guest in my car I guess it can be a bit disconcerting.  When Emily rode with me over Christmas, she said, "Laura, this sounds dangerous."

Last week was my nephew's baptism in New Jersey.  I suggested to Matt that we take my car for the drive.  That meant Matt had several hours of time in the "helicopter," and guess what showed up at our house a few days later.

A brand new engine mount.

Matt changed the engine mount on Friday night while I made dinner and at one point he came to the back door to show me the difference between the old one and the new one.

He seemed shocked.

"Look at the old one!" he said, "Watch how it moves back and forth! It is completely shot!!!"

I'm an English major with zero automotive training and I could have told you that.

After he was finished, I took my car for a spin around the block.  I finally and officially felt like I was driving a Stealth.

Or maybe a Prius.

I ran my weekend errands with unbridled joy.  I felt like a new person, just tooling around town quietly and changing lanes without hesitation, because the rear view mirror wasn't violently shaking and I could actually tell what lane my fellow motorists were in.

By Sunday afternoon I was so hopped up on my new/old car joy and the spring weather that I decided I was going to do a major car clean out.  I opened the trunk and all the doors and even brought my phone out to plug in and play through the speakers.

I cleaned and scrubbed and even vacuumed every square inch of fabric until every single piece of salt from the winter was gone.  I was just about finished when my music stopped.  I turned the key to get the car going again, but all I heard was a foreboding cranking sound.

Uh-oh.

I had killed my battery.

My Stealth had broken down.

Matt heard the cranking and he appeared at the front door just as I did. He was thrilled with the dead battery news, as you might imagine!

Just kidding. 

But he pulled his big old F-150 close to my car.  He put the jumper cables on his battery and then told me to see if they were long enough to stretch over to mine.

It was then that I learned an important part of car jumping, which I will now share for the good of the general population: one shall never, ever touch the ends of the jumper cables together.  Sparks abounded!!

Life is never dull for Matt.

As it turns out Matt's truck battery is so old that it didn't have enough power to jump my Focus.  So we had to let his truck run for a while and then, finally, and I do mean finally, it had enough juice to roar Old Blue back to life. 

I'm happy to report I've now gone 48 hours without a car problem.

Everything is, quite literally, running smoothly, in my very own Blue Angel.

was that a work training or a therapy session?

Tuesday night I came down a terrible cold, because (here I go with the weather talk again) it still feels like winter here and I think my immune system has given up.

I had a long meeting today and had to leave at the crack of dawn 7:15, so I woke up early to put a roast in the crock pot.  I was feeling so on top of things as I put salt back in the cabinet, and in the process knocked a giant bottle of sesame oil off of a high shelf, onto the counter, and then onto the floor, where it shattered and sesame oil went all over our beautiful new cabinets, new hardwood floor, my pajamas and my slippers.

I have no idea why we had that large bottle of sesame oil in the cabinet.  I don't know when I would have used it, but I do know that a little sesame oil goes a long way, and that large quantities do not smell so great.

I cleaned up the cabinets and the floor and myself, rushed to my meeting and settled in for the morning session, which was about empathy.  Let me preface this by saying that I am a paralegal.  I like laws and rules and policies and things that are black and white.  In work and life in general, feelings, emotions, and gray area are not really my wheelhouse.

But, I work mostly with social workers and that's who the training was geared towards, so I buckled up for the empathy ride and spent the first ten minutes wondering what the difference was between the words "empathic" and "empathetic."

As I poured a second cup of hotel coffee, which I admittedly LOVE, the instructor told us that we were going to do an activity.  In order to feel empathy for others, we have to know our own feelings.  She told us to close our eyes, and for five excruciatingly long minutes, we had to speak positive things to ourselves in our heads.  

I am admittedly my own biggest fan and even I struggled with that.

And then, as a grand finale, we had to give ourselves a big old bear hug.

After the hug and a welcomed lunch break, there was a box of crayons and a sheet of paper with a house on it at our seats.  The instructor told us to color the house and add five favorite things that represent what home means to us.

So I drew, albeit not very well and in no particular order: a book, my bed, Matt, a fireplace, and our couch.

Yes, that's a couch there on the bottom left.  I tried to add some dimension and failed miserably.  I'm not an artist.  

Anyway, the time came for us to share what we had drawn, and we started going around the room.  The first few people said things like "This quilt represents home being a place of comfort and refuge; this welcome mat represents warmly opening door to those who come to it; I drew a champagne glass because home is a place of joy and celebration; this rocking chair sits in our living room and has been passed through generations and ties our family together."

Um, mayday.  

MAY. 

ACTUAL. 

DAY.

My peers had all put such thought into their five objects, and captured feelings and meaning and family legacy.

I drew my couch. 

I silently willed the trainer not to call on me while simultaneously trying to think of a deep meaning for my fireplace.  Luckily there were plenty of social workers willing to share their items, so I did not have to report out  

But my colleague Heather was next to me and she looked over at my paper and whispered incredulously, "Is that...your...bed?"

I was talking to friends earlier this week about "reaching emotional capacity" and how ridiculous it was for a grown up to hypothetically leave his or her job because he or she had hypothetically reached emotional capacity.

Listen.  By 4:00 today I HAD REACHED EMOTIONAL CAPACITY.

Add in a head cold and a girl who has ignored her gas light for the better part of three days and you have me, driving an hour home with my little gas door wide open, just wishing for my bed and my book and my sesame oil slippers.

Training days are a nice way to get out of the office, but I can't wait to sit at my desk tomorrow and write a petition.  With facts.  Based on law.

Maybe I'll report back on my feelings about it.

But probably not. 

is it april or is it january?

Well, I hate to talk about the weather again but I'M GOING TO TALK ABOUT THE WEATHER AGAIN.

I worked from home on Friday and it was glorious.  I opened all the windows in the house and set my computer up at the kitchen island and turned the music way up loud.  When the clock struck 4:00 I ran over to Marshall's because apparently I was on a minimalism kick when I packed up my summer clothes last year, and donated most of them in an ill-fated pursuit of a capsule wardrobe.

Plus I really want a jumpsuit.

Marshall's had several and I tried a bunch on but couldn't get past the patterns.   So many patterns.  So many large flowers.  So many styles that look like wallpaper from the eighties.  However, I've never worn a more comfortable item of clothing so I think I'm going to go back and get it.

After Marshall's I went next door to Barnes and Noble and witnessed an incredibly awkward interaction between the cashier and the customer in front of me who was doing everything he could to engage her in a controversial political conversation.  He was doing a complicated return so he was there for several minutes.  Finally I just started reading the book I was buying, a children's book about Noah's Ark, and by the end everyone in line was so riled up I just wanted to read it aloud to all of us.

Matt and I both woke up bright and early on Saturday to seize the 82 degree day.  I got the grocery shopping out of the way first and then helped Matt build a windowsill in the kitchen.  After lunch we started on some outside work and Emily came over.  She was home from college for the weekend, and my mom's washing machine broke so she came to our house with a hamper full of dirty clothes and an iced coffee for me.

I'll admit, she knows her audience.

While Em did her laundry we cleaned up the back patio and set up all of the furniture.  Matt was at Lowe's and came home with a big cedar pole and a new mailbox.  Em and I stood in the yard while Matt moved the pole around and asked things like "Could you turn it the other way?  How about a moving it back a tiny bit?  What if you center it under the light?"  

At one point our neighbor Leo yelled from across the street "Hey Matt, a little more to the left!"

Finally Matt decided to just go ahead and dig a giant hole.  This photo of Working Hard and Hardly Working was taken about three seconds before Matt dug a deep hole and hit something hard full force, and then said, "Oh man, I really hope that was a rock and that I didn't just hit that water line."

In the end we decided to wait on the mail box but now we have a giant hole by our front door, and you can imagine my panic when I walked out front Sunday morning and the hole was FILLED WITH WATER.

I thought we may have a major water line disaster on our hands but it turns out it had just rained a lot overnight.

Sunday was Jack's baptism and if you're thinking he looks like an angel, you would be correct.



Work has been busy this week but I can't complain because this week officially starts what I have creatively named "my spring schedule" even though it snowed today.  I saved up lots of vacation time all year so I can take off every Friday from now until mid-July.  This Friday is my first day off, and in an unusual turn of events, Matt and I will be spending the day doing community service on the USS Constitution. 

His company does a day of community service for employees and families.  We got our assignment last week, which is working on the second deck, forward berthing.  I have no idea what that means, or what we will be doing exactly, but you can bet I'll be saying "Ahoy, matey" and wearing some cute boat shoes.

And maybe I should see if Marshall's has a nautical themed jump suit.