Day 14

We've been trying to get as much done as possible before I start work tomorrow, so I haven't had time to keep my blog current. We've been working 12+ hour days on this for the last week or more. Here's a little photo update though.

First I finished moving all our cabinets into their new places, and building some that we needed. Then I turned our entire kitchen into a huge paint booth, and donned my spray-paint gear.





The sprayer was borrowed from a buddy of mine. There's nothing special about it, in fact when I picked it up I was.. 'surprised' by how simple it was. I thought it would be more, well, heavy duty. But it did an amazing job. I had to add water to the paint to get it to spray smoothly. The finished product exceded my expectations.


Here's Camila (in her lounge-around-on-Sunday clothes) breaking in our new kitchen. Of course by "new" I mean what's done so far. There's still the floor, walls, ceiling, and counter-tops left to do. And where are all the cabinet doors you don't see?? They're drying an extra day before I hang them.



We went with my buddy Will's suggestion to swap the stove and the dishwasher locations in my Sketchup model to keep the "working triangle" smaller. It was less work for me, since the dishwasher didn't have to move. Also the stove has a small amount of counter space on both sides, as you can see in the photo above. If I had put the stove where the dishwasher is, it wouldn't have had any counter-space on the right side.

..and FYI, moving the stove to it's new location 10' away was not cheap. I had to run a whole new circuit to the breaker box in the garage because the old circuit used aluminum 3-wire (no longer code). I spent $67 on new copper 4-wire. Then of course I had to upgrade the outlet and pigtail to accomodate the new wire configuration: another $35. So.....

New stove wiring: $67
New outlet and pigtail: $35
Wife loving the layout of her new kitchen?

You guessed it... "priceless"



Here's another angle of the kitchen, that shows where our "breakfast nook" used to be. The window trim has been updated to match the style we've done in other parts of the house. And if you look at the cabinet on the right, next to the stove, we actually bought that at the Rebuilding Center for $10. The doors match our doors and it was a perfect fit for that side of the stove!




I added crown molding to the tops of all the cabinets as you can see below. For you home do-it-yourselfers who want to install crown molding, rather than waste time twisting your molding around in the air trying to figure out how to cut the correct angle on your miter saw, click here and follow Dewalt's instructions. They have a great article on how to cut crown molding.





And since I'm way into aesthetics, I added outlets above all the cabinets, and tied them to a light switch on either end of the kitchen. That way I could plug low voltage lights into them and have some cool mood lighting. This was something I couldn't do when the soffets were still in place.. (evil soffets!)





And finally just a note, since I'm sorta proud of myself on this one.....

I made yes made these cabinets. The doors were reused from other cabinets that I removed. The one on the left side came from a corner cabinet that we removed (where the stove is now), and the one on the right was a wall cabinet in its previous life. As mentioned above I had to make some cabinets, these are them.





So what's next?
Now that we've removed all the cabinets and appliances from this wall that currently divides the kitchen from the living room, we can remove it and install the cabinets you see there as an island. I've pasted the before and after pics so you can visualize with me..