Kitchen Wars: The Main Event!

Okay, not really. I would say the sink is the crowning piece to our kitchen. Because I loooove it. But I was really excited about our counters. And "The Main Event!" sounds a lot cooler than "Counters!" Plus, then you might expect to see a certain lovable vampire on here.

Ack, no. Bleh. via

Much better. via

Do you concur? ("I should've concurred!") (Apparently my computer doesn't think 'should've' is a word.) (I like parenthetical statements.)

Anyhow, counters. We thought long and hard about what kind we wanted. In a perfect world, we'd get some kind of nice, black/dark gray granite. It would look so cool with the white cabinets, and the walls painted ... some pretty color or other. But, let's be honest here: our house is 60 years old (this year! Happy Birthday!) and our neighborhood, while a great neighborhood, is not really a "granite counter" kind of neighborhood. For the most part, it's filled with 50s ranch homes. There are a few $500k+ houses, but I think those people are stupid. Haven't they ever heard the mantra, "Buy the smallest house in the best neighborhood you can afford"? (We did, but couldn't afford any of those kind of neighborhoods.) We didn't want to make their mistake of building over the neighborhood. Plus, we didn't want to spend thousands of dollars on a counter we wouldn't enjoy the rest of our life. But didn't want something we didn't like. Eventually we found a good compromise that we liked: wood! I was leery at first--Kurt suggested it--but after some research found out they're actually very durable, cost effective, and look cool! So we looked around and saw that Ikea had nice looking, thick wood counters for super cheap (even with our flights out to Utah and our moving truck on the way home). We couldn't resist.

They sat in their boxes for a long time (July - February), but when I got home from work one day and saw them sitting on the cabinets, I couldn't help but squeal with glee.

GLEEEEE!

There was still a lot of work to do on the counters--cutting a hole for the sink and deciding on a stain(ish)--but for now, I was pretty happy to just look at them.

(Date: February 12th, 2011)

Kitchen Wars: Sweet, Painted Cabinets

To the tune of Elton John's "Sweet Painted Lady." Actually, no we didn't paint them again, but in a few paragraphs you'll see the wording that inspired that bad parody.

As you saw in the last post, Kurt was moving bottom cabinets into place. So, here they are, mostly installed! As you can see, we took our galley kitchen and made it into a U-shape. Way more counter space--huzzah! We also pushed back the cabinets on the right by a good foot and a half. Still not a large kitchen by any stretch of the imagination, but Kurt and I can walk by each other now without having to squeeze/shimmy our way past. Huzzah again!

As part of our budget-keeping initiative, the only new cabinets we bought were the two corner units and the sink unit. From--you guessed it--Ikea. They don't match exactly, but whatever. Although, apparently now they do have doors that match our other ones, so we'll have to hit those up when Ikea opens in Denver (this fall! Huzzah x3!). I was going to paint the doors so they have the same painted look (see what I did there?) as the rest of the cabinets. Buuuut, since we'll probably get new, matching doors in the fall, I see no reason to. The difference is subtle, so why bother? (Now I have Weezer's "Why Bother" in my head.) Although, it may end up driving me crazy, but we'll see about that. In the meantime, we do have to paint some other cabinets, so I'll probably go ahead and paint the boxes. 

And now, for the fourth time: HUZZAH!

(Date: February 10th, 2011)

Kitchen Wars: Lay Me Down

After Kurt primed the newly drywalled walls (er?), he laid down the flooring. We replaced the flooring in the main part of the kitchen due to some water damage from last summer, and then put down flooring in the annex. We just did wood-looking laminate because of two reasons: we already had it in the dining area and office and didn't want to two different wood floors in the same, small house, especially right next to each other; and we couldn't afford to lay down all new hardwood flooring. Actually we could, but let's face it, this house is 60 years old. It's in that awkward stage where it's too old to be considered cool but not quite old enough to be cool again. Don't get me wrong, we love our house. But one goal we've kept in mind with this project is to not build over the house and neighborhood. The flooring looks awesome though. We get compliments on it all the time. And I really love it, because if you get paint on it, you can scratch it right off. That comes in handy for a klutzy painter like yours truly.

Also involved with putting down new flooring was moving the cabinets on the right side of the kitchen (well, now middle of the kitchen).  

 

That plumbing is from/for the sink.

 Then after the new flooring was in, he started moving the cabinets back into place.

So, the color of this flooring is not our first choice. Kurt and I are cool wood people. We're cool color people, too. In case you hadn't picked that up from the white white walls, the greens, the blues. I just love cool colors on the walls and so does Kurt. Both of us get overheated really easily and I think the cool colors keep us calm. I can just imagine myself getting all hot and stuffy in a red room. Ack! Not good!

If we had our first choice, we would've gone with a nice lighter toned wood probably. And then walnut counter tops. And light gray walls. Ah, that sounds like heaven to me. But, we've made do with what we've got. Trying to stay under budget, you know! And what we've got is warm mid-tone wood flooring. If we hated it, we'd replace it. But we don't. We just don't LOVE it. But we like it well enough. Plus, it's forcing us to design outside of our comfort zone (there's been talk of dark, warm brown walls for the kitchen ... what??) and it's been fun to play around with it.

(Date: February 8th, 2011)

Kitchen Wars: Closet Freak

After all the plumbing was all ready, Kurt built a wall and a man came to do our drywall. That is the only thing we've hired someone else to do. It was just way faster/easier and less messy to do it that way. This was the day Denver didn't get above -3 all day. I worked from home. I really like sitting on my bed to do my work, while Kurt works out in the living area with classic rock playing. It was fun.

After 4 days of work, we had a whole new closet!

This closet is behind that extended white wall in the first two pictures. We bought a stackable, front-loading washer/dryer set and hid them in here. 

It's funny we diminished our laundry room so much, because I loved how big the laundry room (annex) was when we looked at the house. But I'd prefer to have a bigger kitchen than a bigger laundry room. Ideally, I'd have a big one of each, but that ain't happenin' in this old 1400 square foot ranch.

(Date: February 4th, 2010)

Kitchen Wars: A Missed Opportunity

The next step was tearing out the carpet so we could get everything ready to lay the new flooring (or so we thought ... more on that later). Kurt was still working at this point, not busy or anything, but usually getting home around 7 pm as usual. So, over the next few weeks we ripped out the baseboards, carpet, padding, and tack strips. Then we discovered that the sub floor in the annex had a small ramp leading to the doorway in the kitchen. You see, we theorize that the annex was once a patio that got closed in. One big clue was the insulation we found in the wall between the kitchen and the laundry room. (Note: I use annex and laundry room interchangeably to denote the same space. In case you're all confused and what not.) Well, that ramp would certainly not do! So Kurt chiseled it out, making a big ol' hole in the subfloor. Then he patched it up.

The next day I realized we missed a great opportunity: we should've put our dogs' paw prints in the cement. How fun would that have been? Seriously, more fun than a barrel of tacks. 

Somehow, I don't think Ruby (left) or Swift (right) would've enjoyed it as much as I would have.

(Date: January 20th, 2011)

Kitchen Wars: And then, we waited...

Kurt made a little bit of progress through the middle of July. Mostly just tearing out insulation. At the end of July, we hit a road block that lasted through the middle of September: Fall Busy Season. Kurt used to work in public accounting doing taxes, and many corporations and individuals file for extensions on their taxes, pushing their deadlines back to September 15th (or October 15th for individuals). None of that is remotely interesting, except for the fact that it halted progress on our kitchen! After that, it was kind of out of mind. Plus, Kurt was still fairly busy with work. Still, by the time we left for Christmas, he had re-routed all of the light switches and outlets in the wall.

We were in Utah for a week for Christmas, then I went to my residency for my grad program on the east coast. While I was there, I got an email from Kurt with the subject line, "Well, there goes the wall." When I took a gander at the attached photos, I couldn't believe me eyes!

(Look James, not only did you make the blog again, but in a picture this time!)

I was geeking out! I showed everyone: my friend Lindsay who was sitting next to me when I got the email, all of my siblings and my parents (forwarded the emails to them), and maybe a few classmates as well.

When I got home a week later, Kurt led me through our front door and over to the kitchen with my eyes covered. When he removed his hands, I geeked out some more. It looked so amazing! 

Now the kitchen reno felt so much more real and I was so excited about it again!

(Date: July 2010 - January 2011)

Kitchen Wars: Demolition Day

At some point during our first year in the house, we decided to expand our kitchen into the laundry room. From there, we spent a lot of time pouring over design blogs and magazines, trying to decide what kind of counter tops, kitchen, etc., we wanted. When we had decided, we planned a special trip to Ikea in Utah to get counter tops, sink, faucet, and cabinets. Even flying to Utah and renting a moving truck to haul it all back, we still saved a ton of money. Yeah for Ikea! The day of the big shopping trip was July 5th.

And on July 10th, Kurt started his demolition!

(Date: July 2010)

Kitchen Wars: White! Like Snow!

Not long after we moved into our house, I fell in love with the idea of white kitchen cabinets. I think part of the reason is because a) my mom has white cabinets and b) the current color of our cabinets didn't match the green walls very well. Now, normally I tend to stay away from decorating trends my mom uses in her own house. My mom has awesome taste but it's like, I want to be different! But white cabinets? They're just so classic. And white. And clean. And I lurve them. 

Our friends James and Camille lived with us for about a month and a half after they moved to Denver, while waiting to close on their house. While they were living here, I decided it was time to paint the cabinets. And then Camille was AWESOME and volunteered to paint them. And then, the day we were to begin painting, a huge snowstorm hit. I like to call it an Octizzard, because it was the middle of October and we had over two feet of snow. Craziness!

So how do you paint kitchen cabinets when there's so much snow outside that your dog gets lost in your own backyard? You get creative...

We laid the doors out on a tarp in the laundry room to paint them. Then, to keep them off the tarp so paint wouldn't pool, we set them on tupperwares. It worked pretty well. We did sand the cabinets--doors and boxes (we haven't painted the inside of the boxes yet... should probably get on that), but learned about a year later that we DIDN'T NEED TO. What?! Thanks to an awesome primer called Gripper. Grrr. Wish I would've known that! But, all of that dust (that our sander did not catch) just prepared us for the dust we've been living with the last few months.

Small house? Just put your drawers on the countertops!

It was a painful process (and I did help Camille after all because I didn't have to work for two days since I couldn't get out of the driveway). But after two days of solid work and MarioKart playing, it was done! And SO worth it. I liked my kitchen before. Now I LOVED it. Also, you can see I put up some fruit pictures on the wall (from Ikea for $5 for all of them and then the frames were like $3 each, I think, from Target).

 Don't you just love it? The white and green=LOVE. I'm pretty sure if you looked up in the dictionary, that's what it would say. 

 But I still wasn't content ... ;)

(Date: October 2009)

Kitchen Wars: The First Step

The first step we took to make the kitchen more "us" was to paint the walls a bright, happy green. I was going more for grass green and ended up with apple green. And I love it! Then we took down the pot rack (which was greasy and nasty) and put up nice, clean shelves instead, for the purpose of holding plates, etc. Nothing special, cuz we knew they weren't a permanent solution. We just found the cheapest, but sturdy, option. The brackets were even white but I painted them to go with my black, white, and green motif. And then we replaced that nasty, boring round light fixture with chrome track lighting. But believe me, sooo much better.



(Date: June-August 2009)

Kitchen Wars: Starting All Over

I know I've posted about the kitchen before, buuut ... we're starting from the beginning.
Here are some before pictures! The first shot is from the MLS listing. That's truly what the kitchen looked like when we moved in. Okay, but not great. And definitely NOT Yours Truly's style. We closed on a Monday and moved in the following Saturday, so that week was filled with painting, painting, painting. And I didn't think to take my own before shots until we'd started painting. As you can see, we (read: I) wanted a green kitchen. This was our first time painting, so we didn't know the tricks (tape swatches to the walls, narrow down from there, then use paint samples to further narrow down), so while the color green we had wasn't quite what I'd imagined, we just went with it. Because we'd already bought a gallon (which we definitely didn't need for those two small walls) of paint and we didn't feel like repainting. And even though our friend James likes to tease me because "the last time we had creative differences, we ended up with a lime green kitchen," I absolutely loved the color. It just took about a week for me to get there. The first pictures makes the kitchen look WAY wider than it was. To walk past Kurt in the kitchen, both of us had to flatten ourselves against the cabinets while I scooched by. Tight fit, to say the last! The window over the sink looked into the huge-among-us laundry room, which we expanded into. Why have a large laundry room when  your kitchen is tiny? That don't make no sense to me.











(Date: June 2009)

The Horizon

As in, there are new things on it. This is not as exciting as it sounds. I just have a new layout and I want to know: switch back to two columns or keep the three? I like the idea of a less cluttered blog, but I'm not so sure ... I've toyed with the idea of pages, but that's just a whole lot of work (for all of us). So, let me know what you think...

And I'm going to start posting my kitchen posts on here. I just don't have the attention span for two separate blogs. The kitchen is so close to done I can just taste it! It tastes like beadboard and paint. Mmm, delish ...

Happy Friday!

To the Unquiet Mind

"True creativity never leads to despair. Creativity leads out of despair."

-Dan Wakefield

In the past few weeks, I've been thinking a lot about creativity. (Obviously, with being at school.) And I've spoken with a few people about being bi polar. It's really made me connect the two ideas as they fit in my life. It's long been known that creativity and madness are often linked. (Kay Redfield Jamison has a book about it, Touched With Fire. I haven't read it yet, but I read An Unquiet Mind and it was fantastic.) What does that mean for me? Listening to music often has the ability to trigger a mood swing. I can listen to an upbeat piece and feel absolutely great about life, then the next song that comes on will be sad and slow and I'll find myself depressed. I know that's true for a lot of people. It's not the mood swings that surprise me, but their extreme range. Very high to very low. Music can do that to me.

But here's where Dan's quote rings true to me. Whenever I create something, whether by writing a story or playing the piano, I am "lead out of despair." Even if it's a sad story or melancholy song, by the end I still feel uplifted. I created something. Something now exists where nothing existed before, by my hand. Despair cannot exist simultaneously with accomplishment, even if that sense of accomplishment does not linger as long as it should.

Like all writers, I've dreamt about the different facets of being published, if one day I do get published. One of the things is book dedications. I don't know why, it's just been my recent focus. I've toyed with a few ideas, but one has stuck so far. I like the idea of every book (if I get so lucky to have more than one book published!) having the same dedication. If not, I want to dedicate all of my work here.

To the Unquiet Mind,

As a reminder of the things you can accomplish

"True creativity never leads to despair. Creativity leads out of despair." -Dan Wakefield

June Goals

Honestly, I'm having a hard time thinking of goals for this month. Perhaps it's because I've only been home for 2.5 days. Perhaps it's because there's only half of the month left. Whatever the reason, I've had to dig deep for what I want to work on for the next 13 days.

1. Write every day. Yeah, I know ... I failed last month, so will this one be any better? I contend that it will! Things that qualify as writing every day: actually typing, outlining, doing research, and staring at the document in despair. As long as my main focus is a work-in-progress, I'll count it. I'm not going to set any certain amount of time. But obviously ten minutes doesn't really count. My goal of one chapter of the YA fantasy a week still stands.

2. Get caught up on my manuscript critiques for my writing groups. I'm not terribly behind, but I owe 6 manuscripts to 4 different people. So yeah, need to get those done!

May Goals Recap

May went by too fast! I can't believe it's June already! How well did I do on my goals last month? Hmm ... let's see ...

1) Write every day. My friend Lindsay is doing that right now and she said she's made huge improvements on her book and writing. I really need to do that too. Especially since my thesis (aka book) is due at the end of the year and it's nowhere near done (in completeness or quality). And I really want to get my YA fantasy completely edited through a second draft by the end of summer. So I plan on writing at least an hour every day, and thoroughly editing one chapter of the YA fantasy a week. I started yesterday and while I didn't get much actually written, I did spend a lot of time staring at the computer and wondering why I'm such an awful writer (it was one of those days). Hopefully today will yield better results! I have to deem this a fail. Some of it was beyond my control--like the fact that Kurt needed the computer a lot for his calling (and we only had one)--and some of it was in my control but due to the fact that I let the ubiquitous writer's discouragement affect me.


2) Thoroughly clean the house by the end of the month. Stuff like cleaning the oven, washing the windows and blinds, dusting weird places like the bathroom vent and ceiling fans. Those sorts of things. Because the house is a disaster. Don't look at me! It's not ... oh yeah, it is my fault. ;) Success! I didn't clean the windows, but I wiped off most of the blinds, cleaned the oven, and dusted the bathroom vent. Oops, forgot the ceiling fans, but whatev. I still count this as a success!

Help I'm Alive

Well, I'm back in high and dry Colorado. My sinuses and skin are not very happy, but it was so good to see Kurt's face on Tuesday night. He picked me up at 11:40 pm with a Sonic drink, rose, and card. :) I had an awesome time in South Carolina--at school and with my parents. School was a jam-packed 9 days spent in workshops, lectures, and readings. I'm once again excited about my YA fiction book (it's my thesis) and feeling motivated and revved up for my LAST semester! And the best part of school was staying with my friend Lindsay, who is seriously the best in the whole world. We got to spend so much time together, driving to and from campus, getting lunch, running to Sonic, and on the last night dancing (even the fiction boys and some of our professors danced). I love that girl!

Usually I tack on my extra time with my parents before school, but this time it worked out better to do it after school. Which I actually like better, because I had four days to relax and recover from the manic pace at school. My little brother, Collin, is the only kid at home and he was typically either gone with his girlfriend or on Monday morning he left for high adventure with his young mens program. So it was often just me and my parents, which was really fun. I got to be "just a daughter" as my mom put it, and I enjoyed it. I had the opportunity to see my grandma and some aunts, uncles, and cousins. And lots of Southern cooking! Grandma had a fish fry on Saturday night with fried flounder, hush puppies, grits, and cole slaw. Mom and I on Monday and Tuesday experimented with lemon cookie recipes for Caroline's Charleston wedding reception. The winning recipe was almost completely devoured by us (I think my dad got two, maybe three cookies). I had such a fantastic time back in my home state!!

Title of post via Metric.