39 weeks

Here I am in the kitchen – you can see the backsplash in the background – that’s what Eric’s been working on this weekend. It looks great!

No signs of impending labor yet…probably for the best since I have a cold right now. I’m getting plenty of rest, though, and hope to be feeling better very soon.

We now have some of our cabinets doors and drawers installed. Here’s a peek:

They should be finished on Friday. The backerboard is down for the tile and Eric and his brother picked up the tile today. It’s all coming together…

Our countertops were installed today – woohoo! They look beautiful. Eric’s working on getting the sinks and cooktop hooked up, so we will have a semi-functional kitchen again this week. I’m so happy!

Sink/oven wall

Island

Cooktop wall (Eric's already getting to work)

A very happy pregnant woman

Most of the work we’ve done on the kitchen so far, with the exception of removing the wall, hasn’t been too impressive to look at. There’s been a lot of prep with plumbing and electrical work that doesn’t show, and so on. But the cabinets started to go in this week and you can finally start to see the shape of the new kitchen.

Here’s the cooktop wall and the back of the island:

The cooktop will be flanked by the pantry on the left and the fridge on the right. Here’s the walkway between the island and cooktop, looking towards the wall where the sink will be:

This is the island, looking out towards the living area:

This is the wall where the dishwasher, sink and oven will be – dishwasher on the far left, oven and microwave on the right, sink under window:

All of the doors and drawers will be installed next week, and then the cabinets will be stained. The countertop contractor is coming on Monday to make a template. Everything is moving along nicely!

And speaking of progress, here’s my latest belly shot (about 27 weeks along):

We continue to move forward, slowly but surely, on the kitchen remodel. Eric’s been working on the electrical for the past couple of weeks, and got all the lighting installed and switches wired. On Saturday his brother Ivan came over and they tore out all the old tile.  Poor Ivan – he always gets roped into helping us when we’re having a heat wave! It was miserable, messy, noisy work. Eric and I spent a good chunk of time yesterday cleaning up, and still have a lot to do. Even though they covered stuff up with tarps as best they could, there’s still a layer of dust over everything in that general area.

I’ll try to post some pics later this week – we’ve got our existing cabinets and appliances set up in a very rough approximation of the new layout so that we can live with it for awhile and see how it works. We haven’t ordered the cabinets yet, so we still have time to make some final tweaks to the plan.

Why do I love my husband? Among other reasons, because he does stuff like this:

Eric’s cutting holes in our ceiling to install some recessed lighting, and he taped plastic bags over the areas where he’d be cutting to catch and contain the mess. How awesome is that? It’s working like a charm, too!

Yesterday we had the final inspection on the wall removal part of our kitchen project – woohoo! It’s a relief to have that signed off. The building inspector told me “your husband does really nice work.” When I passed that on to Eric, he said “he must see a lot of really crappy work if he thinks mine looks good.” The man can’t take a compliment.

Eric got a lot accomplished while I was gone. The beam is in place, the wall is gone, and we finally have a sense of how things might work in our enlarged space. You can’t see it in this photo, but Eric has taped out some boundaries on the floor so we can see where the new cabinets would go, and the table and everything else. It’s much easier to visualize now that the wall is gone. We’ll live with it for a little bit and then make some tweaks to our plan.

In order to get this done, he rented a UHaul, took it to the lumber yard, had them hoist the beam onto the top of the UHaul, backed the UHaul up to the garage and slid the beam on top of the garage into a hole in the front of the house and into position in the attic. Pretty ingenious, don’t you think?

We are moving forward, slowly but surely, on our kitchen project. Most of the work to date has been done underneath the house or in the attic, so there hasn’t been much to show. But this is what greeted me when I came home from work on Saturday. Eric removed all the plaster and drywall from the wall that is going to come down. You can see that there used to be a pass-through, although that had been drywalled over by the time we bought the house. We’re starting to get a feel for what it will be like when the room is totally open. It’s definitely brighter now that you can see the light from windows on both walls and the kitchen skylight. Nice.

We’re making progress on our selections as well. We bought our cooktop and range hood (on sale at Sears). We found a floor tile we like. We’re still trying to decide whether or not to use the Ikea cabinets we like or go for a higher quality option that looks very similar but is of course more expensive. The countertops will depend on the cabinets we choose, but we are leaning towards Caesarstone.

Eric’s taking time off at the end of the month while I’m at the Eureka Institute to get the new beam installed, and then we can tear down what’s left of the wall and really get going with the new stuff. Progress is good!

I’m almost afraid to write about this for fear of jinxing it, but we have finally embarked on a kitchen remodel. We’ve been talking about redoing our kitchen almost since we moved into our house (a little over 10 years ago), and we just started the first phase of the project which is removing a load-bearing wall between the kitchen and living room so that we can have an open-plan kitchen, living and dining area.

It’s going to be a major ordeal. In order to remove the wall, we have to put a new beam in the ceiling, and we have to pour a new concrete footing under the house to support the column that will support one end of the beam. Eric’s been digging the hole for the new footing, and in order to facilitate that process he cut through the floor of our coat closet which is conveniently right above where the footing needs to go. This way he can at least sit up part of the time that he’s digging. He also threw down a carpet scrap to keep the dust down and make it a little more comfortable down there – although comfort is relative when you’re digging in a 2 foot crawl space and hauling dirt out in buckets…

Yesterday when I got home from work, I found that Eric had moved an entire section of our kitchen into the dining room. We want to be able to use the kitchen for as long as we possibly can during the remodel process, so this was Eric’s solution. It may not make for the most efficient work triangle, but I think it’s pretty ingenious.

And so it begins…I’ll be carrying a tape measure in my purse for the next few months as we make our final decisions on appliances and so on. It’s fun and nerve-wracking at the same time – everything ties together and I worry that one wrong decision will screw up the whole process. I’m trying to just stay focused and not stress over it too much, but since we’re just at the beginning of the process I expect it to get more difficult as we move forward. I’ll post more pictures as we make progress. Wish us luck!