Our New Kitchen

Our old kitchen

The last eight days have been a bit crazy at our house. My parents came up here and took Landon and Davis to their house for a week for "grandma and grandpa camp," while Shane and I redid our kitchen. The work was long and strenuous, but we're feeling pretty good about the almost finished product. Here's a brief summary of our week:

• Painting - I removed our cupboard doors and drawers, sanded them (with A LOT of help from my mom), then primed and painted two coats on all of them. I also painted the walls red, and in the end, the beadboard and baseboards.
  
• Flooring - We installed new laminate flooring over our existing permanently dirty looking linoleum.
  
• Counter top - We installed a granite tile counter top to replace our old permanently stained cream Formica. This was definitely the hardest job, as we had to cut the tiles, put up the backerboard (that was the BIGGEST pain- let's not talk about it!), got the tiles bull-nosed, set the tile, grouted the tile . . . and pretty soon, sealed the tile.

Besides that, my days, while I did have a break from my normal mothering duties, were more like this:

• Average three showers a day, and I still have paint in miscellaneous places on my body


• Two trips to Home Depot per day, plus one to Tile for Less, our new favorite tile store.
  
• Getting up at 6:30 a.m. to start working by 7, and only sitting down to eat lunch and dinner, and for the occasional car ride back and forth from Home Depot, until average 1:00 a.m.

Our bodies are sore, and Shane now needs a chiropractic visit, but you can check out the photos below. We'll have to post the final "after" photos, for as you can see, we still don't have the cupboard doors on or the kitchen sink in! Hopefully we can hang in there to finish it up soon.

Cupboards painted and walls primed

Half the cupboard doors drying after their first coat of paint, and the new red walls

Just after setting the tile countertop

Our current product

(oh, there's magnetic paint on the back of the cupboard over the bar)