Kitchen, Continued: "Back to those things we said we'd do when we toured the house the first time"

Ever since we moved in, there's been this strange cabinet-where-a cabinet-used-to-be-or-something, next to the refrigerator. The previous owners put their trash can there; we opted to put the trash can elsewhere so we could pack it full of crap:

   

I kid. Anyway, the first time we toured the house, we were all like "we'll put a wine fridge there!" Sure. Only.. a "wine fridge" has never been anywhere really close to halfway down The List. ("The merest thought had not the inkling of a possibility to begin to cross my mind...") We'd halfheartedly "measure" any wine fridges we stumbled across at Target, decide they were too wide or something and go buy popcorn.

BUT.

We're trying to shape up the kitchen, if you hadn't noticed. What with the new and refinished countertops, new sink, new faucets, and tiling project--it seemed like time to do something with the un-cabinet. THEN we just so happened to find the cheapest and most-appropriately-dimensioned wine fridge we'd seen yet. So, Merry Christmas to us:



If anyone's looked into these things you might be thinking to yourself, "but those aren't meant to be 'built-in'! It says so on the side!" Welp, thanks to the weirdness of this cabinet area (I still don't know why the door got cut off, whenever it did), there's actually built-in dead space to the sides and back of the unit. Its little vents have all kinds of room to do their thing. So, uh, chilled beverage anyone?

Today's the day: Countertop Installation

Well, here we go. We are waiting on the countertop dudes to arrive. Before the chaos ensues, I thought I would memorialize the laminate-that-was:

Ahh.

And here's the view from the other side of the "Cheeseburger Window:"

We got inspired the day the guy came to template the countertop and asked him to measure for the piece in the opening of the Cheeseburger Window, too. I'm excited for that; because it was less than 5 square feet, it didn't affect the cost of the project at all. (!) I've removed the moulding from the sides; the countertop guys will take off the sill-piece that's there, then we'll trim the old moulding and put it back.

So... that's where we are right now. I'll update as I can get more pictures. In the meantime, party in the dining room:

UPDATE:  Sink is out; the Mr. spent awhile on the floor.

In the foreground are tools integral to the job: drill bits, a spray nozzle, and a spoon.
UPDATE: Old counter is out.
UPDATE: OMG, SHINY!  Also, the new sink is HUGE.
UPDATE: Slight hiccup with the faucet-hole placement. Offset sink with bowl on left + faucet with attached lever on right + soap dispenser + sprayer thingie = interesting combination.

FINAL UPDATE: It's dooooone!!! Yaaaay!  We love it. Sorry for the blurry/dark/grainy/cropped pictures, we have a good bit of  'touching up' to do on parts of the cabinets that had been covered by the lip of the old counter and I was trying to find an angle that looked as complete as possible. We're not hooking anything back up tonight.. we figure we should let the silicone cure or whatever.  Also, the fumes are killing our brain cells and we need a beer to celebrate.

The enhanced Cheeseburger Window (it's like a wee breakfast bar!):

The installation guys were great--they did a super job with topsy-turvy cabinets, walls, and cutouts. Can't wait for y'all to see it!

Another Lamp Meets My Insatiable Desire to Spray-Paint Things

I'm getting pretty efficient with this, I found. Wasn't my first rodeo. To the pictures!

Another day, another brass lamp.  This one came from the Habitat ReStore, and was $3.

Enter gold-braid-trimmed Goodwill lampshade, bought with another $3 lamp.. 5? 6 years ago?  I didn't hang on to it on purpose, exactly... but it's managed to survive three moves. At least it's durable.

The living room rug came bound with these strips of woven canvas tape stuff. I saved them, to cover unsightly gold lampshade braid, of course. (Shrug.)

Wha-bam! 10 minutes with Rustoleum UltraCover in Slate Blue, and some hot glue. 
This lamp sits in the Captain's Quarters and didn't have to match anything; I just wanted to paint it blue. I.. like to paint lamps.  IS THAT A CRIME.

Counters, Revisited: Probably Ill-Advised Pre-Thanksgiving DIY Shakedown, Part II

We have had a scheduling delay on the new countertop, so we're spiffing up other areas while we wait. The granite arrives on Thursday, which gave us this past weekend to twiddle our thumbs and wander aimlessly around Home Depot.

The wandering, combined with a lovely Fall day, as well as pending kitchen spifferation, inspired us to refinish the wooden countertops again. Looking back at that post, it's been over a year since the first stain/finish experiment, and we have some lessons learned:

• Cabot Polystain (stain & topcoat combined) was indeed very durable, and held up to a ton of washing, dinging, food prep, etc.
• It did not, however, weather popping/splattering grease from the stove. At all. We figure this will be an issue with any product, and opted to put a glass cutting board over the side of the counter that got the most grease-splatter abuse. This has since worked out great (and given us another cutting surface), but the damage had been done:

We'd expected to have to refinish them again, and figured that our stain treatment (while maybe not as durable) would be much easier to re-do than the original--the Mr. went through a zillion rotary sander pads trying to get whatever marine-grade shellac the previous owners had off. (We even tried two kinds of chemical stripping agent, and both failed miserably.)

It did indeed prove much easier than the first time. In the space of about an hour they were all sanded back down and ready to restain.  The Captain kept an eye on the proceedings:

This time, we're going with Minwax Polyshades in 'American Chestnut' gloss, instead of satin. It's going to be a little richer of a color than before, and hopefully by the second/third coat it won't be too dark.  Stay tuned...

Sidebar: Spiraled! (Or, Why Didn't We Do This Months Ago?)

I don't know if I've mentioned the Cookbook Project or no--but chances are, all of you reading this already know we have this cookbook that we're trying to cook our way through 'Julie & Julia'-style. Only, you know, cooler... because we're not whiny about it. Most of the time.
Anyway, it turns out that softcover cookbooks aren't really up to that kind of daily abuse. Here it is, about  seven months and over a hundred recipes in:

After about the 30th page fell out this weekend, I finally remembered to take it with me to work (there's a Kinko's/FedEx Office/whatever nearby).  For about $5 they cut off the spine, punch holes and throw in a coil.


Giggle.  And look! It lays flat!  Win. 



That's all. Back to regularly scheduled programming...

So It Begins

Hello, again. And welcome to episode one of the "Probably Ill-Advised Pre-Thanksgiving DIY Kitchen Shakedown." Yes, it's November. And No, we haven't started yet. All in good fun.

Item number one on the agenda: countertop.  You may remember from past postings that half of our kitchen is charming (and lovingly re-finished) hand-crafted "butcher block." The other half is scary wood-trimmed laminate.

After over a year of scrubbing away the stains (and I mean STAINS.  This counter has been known to soak the printing off of plastic bags. Seriously. For weeks it advertised "AT&T Wireless." There was also the Maraschino Cherry Juice Incident of '09.)... we're finally doing something about it.

I should have documented the whole tortuous process, but here's the summary:

US: Quartz is cool, give us some samples.
[a few months pass]
US: Right, we forgot. Quartz is still cool. Let's get more samples.
ME: I like the brown. No, the gray. No, the gray-brown. The brown.
LOWE'S: Your kitchen is too small.
HOME DEPOT: So, the brown?
[crickets]
ME: AAAIGH! NO BROWN!
THE MR.: Seriously?
[there is much shuffling of samples.]
US: We meant granite.
HOME DEPOT: Your kitchen is too small.
LOCAL PLACE: Hello. We have nice slabs.
US: Our kitchen is too small.
LOCAL PLACE: We love you anyway. Also, we cost less.

We went skipping around the slab yard, and despite being momentarily dazzled by some sort of Chilean silver-impregnated something-or-rather that we would have had to sing to sleep every night, we made a decision.

Say hello to Slab.

So, yes, it's brownish, but it has a lot of black in it and a lot of depth.  The picture is kind of bad. Trust us--it's a lot more exciting than the flattish brown Quartz we were initially after. (I started thinking of it as 'mouse putty,' and, well, that's not what you want to prepare your meals on.) 

They came to measure for it a couple of days ago, and it'll be installed next week sometime. (Another plus to Local Place:  both HD and Lowe's claimed it would take "at least" four to six weeks.) In the meantime, I'll be taking 'before' pictures...