Oh boy. Here we go--this is the post that I have been putting off writing for so dang long because I knew it was going to be such a giant task! But Matthew is napping and I've got 78 minutes before the kids get home, so here we go--this is going to be long because there is so much I want to remember.
October 27, 2017: our first dinner in our new home. We closed on both houses that day so it was a long and crazy day but we were so so so dang happy to be in that house and I think you can definitely see it in my smile!
But let's backtrack a bit. And I'm going to include a lot of dates so that you can see that this was not a quick turnaround! As I was scrolling through all the photos on my phone I was kind of blown away by how many projects we had going simultaneously while we also had so much life stuff going on. It's interesting to see how I either totally pull back on projects when I'm overwhelmed or I just dive right in and sort of hide myself in them. And this has been a pretty heavy couple of years.
These two photos are from September 7, 2017. This is the first time we saw this house and I LOVED it immediately (I had loved it so much, in fact, that when I saw it online it had already been pulled from the market and I called the realtor begging to let us come look anyway. It took three? Four? visits--and looking at about two dozen other homes in person + several hundred online to convince Neil that my vision for this house would work. Poor Neil! He was so very much not a fan of this house AT ALL and we had some pretty heated debates about it but eventually I talked him around).
Anyway--I took the photo below when I was standing at the island and I KNEW right then that this was the house for us and I could literally hear my children's voices and envision our family here. So this is a very special photo for me.
November 7, 2017: all moved in and I'm starting to order furniture. The laundry room is our top priority so we begin demo on it almost immediately. Meanwhile I'm painting the dining room and working to get it ready to host Thanksgiving. My kitchen priority is replacing all the appliances (my mom walked in, looked at the double ovens, and was like "We had these exact ones when I was a kid!")
January 1, 2018: dishwasher and fridge are delivered. Neil & my dad slice a goodly chunk off the Corian countertops so that we can slide the fridge in. Me: "We better replace those counters sooner rather than later."
March 10, 2018: We've been loving our double ovens, dishwasher, and new fridge for the last few months, and I fiiiinnally took the Craigslist plunge after a crazy amount of research and back-and-forth and bought a JennAir gas cooktop from a guy in a Kroger parking lot for $1500. (Brand new--he bought it to flip a house and didn't realize the house had no gas hookups. I was also about 85% convinced we were going to be Craigslist murders.) Neil, that magical wonder of a man, ran a gas line in and we are in business! I also paint the backsplash because I don't like the earth tones (basically just mixed white paint with gray acrylics and then cut it with water).
We take a pause on the kitchen over the summer--we are working on other projects and my sister is diagnosed with cancer.
September 27, 2018--the last pictures I take before the saws and paintbrushes come out. Neil saws the appliance garage off the bottom of the cabinets, then heads to Europe.
While Neil's in Germany, I decide to surprise him with some fun painting when he gets home (this was right after his Pittsburgh trip where he came home to find the fireplace had been painted). It's probably a little nerve-wracking for him to leave town.
October 8, 2018
October 10, 2018
October 13, 2018
October 13, 2018--somewhere in here I decide it would be a fun date night to go look at countertops. We go to five or six places and then suddenly we have paid thousands of dollars so we can tear our kitchen up some more!
October 16, 2018--the first set of doors are finally cured and ready to be re-hung! (I have mostly blurred out how many coats of paint I did but I think it was 2 primer front and back, then 4 paint front and 3 back. I did them all by hand with a brush and Neil helped me once for about an hour, but the rest of the time this was my solo project while he was doing other things--like repairing the mostly-destroyed doors for the island that we found down in the basement in a heap of things left by the previous owner.)
October 17, 2018: Neil removes the upper cabinets and starts building a frame for the vent hood
October 24, 2018--we make a GIANT MESS taking out the backsplash (but look at that vent hood!)
October 24, 2018
October 24 was a really long day, guys. I don't think we went to bed until 4 am--the countertop guy had called and said that they had an open slot to do our countertops and we could do it the next day instead of waiting until Christmas.
Mostly in our marriage I am the one who starts crying and gets overwhelmed by things, but this is one of the very few times that Neil has been the overwhelmed one and I have been the "it's okay we got this" one. We had been working like crazy this day and we were just about to take off the old countertops (I think we saved like $600 by doing it ourselves?) and then I was like...oh honey...the countertops run underneath the support pillar. And poor Neil just literally stood there and was like "I know what we have to do but I cannot do it...I cannot bring myself to start taking that pillar apart," so I ended up working on it for about fifteen minutes until it got to the point of no return, which is when Neil was able to say okay, we obviously cannot patch this back up, so it's time to attack it with both of us.
October 25, 2018--the morning of countertop installation. I think I took this pic about 4 am after we had carried the old countertops out to the garage and whacked them to bits with sledgehammers which was legitimately one of the most satisfying things I've ever done (so satisfying, in fact, that we saved the island for the kids to whack the next day).
Here is that amazing husband of mine just casually moving plumbing around as the countertops are being installed--he managed to make the column SO much smaller!
In this photo we took before pulling the old counters out, you can see how enormous the column's footprint was (they had actually put on multiple layers of drywall around it to square it out).
Countertops coming in!!! We went with a beautiful quartz that I love SO SO much.
October 27, 2018--we have now lived here for a year!
October 30, 2018--almost done tiling the backsplash!
November 9, 2018: we throw a giant party for all our friends and wrap the exposed sewer line in Christmas wrapping paper. It ends up being a great conversation piece!
Thanksgiving is the perfect time to enjoy our new kitchen.
December 13, 2018--Neil is making incredible progress with the most beautiful oak box built around the column.
December 27, 2018: as one does, I decide to celebrate taking down the holiday decorations with painting!
January 1, 2019: we throw another party (for New Year's Eve) with our half-painted built-ins and mostly-finished column. Lookin' pretty stylish.
January 19...as long as I'm already painting...
February is a hard month but there's this little ray of light.
And on February 6 Neil makes more progress on the vent hood cover...
March 13, 2019--Neil finishes the column in its entirety and patches up the drywall!
And I finish the built-ins.
We come back from spring break and I start on the windows on April 8...
I finish them on April 12 (and somewhere in here Neil has finished the range hood)...
And on April 15 my parents tell me that I should send a picture of our cupped floor to our insurance company.
We find out that a leaky dishwasher has basically destroyed not only the wood, but the subfloor, and since the oak flooring runs underneath our cabinets, everything in the kitchen has to come out.
So during the last week of school in May, our kids come home to this:
By the time we leave for a family reunion on May 30, it looks like this.
And we send about a million pictures back and forth with the floor guys (and my saintly friend Kelsey goes over to our house and Facetimes me and negotiates with the floor guys to mix up all the batches of mixed proportion stains that Kelsey and I create).
And on June 8, 2019, we come home to this beauty.
By June 14 the cabinets, appliances, and countertops are all back in place.
When the kids head back to school in August, I start working on my little office area...
And on September 9th, Neil has finished building the trash drawer and I have painted it and the kitchen is DONE. **
**but there's still lots to do. Like finish the ceiling. And strip and restain the basement door. And swap out the crown molding and install/paint the toekick under the trash can...
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