The Kitchen

I started a while back journaling what we have done to our house since we bought it about 3+ years ago. Here's the original state of the kitchen:

One of the first things we did (in the kitchen and throughout the house) was turn most of the tile into hardwood flooring. Every time a little head hits the floor, I am thankful for the wood. Just before we put in the floor in, we painted...

Unable to replace the cupboards, they turned white and the walls went yellow (again, along with the rest of the house). I have to put a word in here for my mother who, at age 61, took the commercial paint sprayer she had recently purchased (are there many 61 year old moms out there that take their carefully hoarded spending money to buy a paint sprayer??) and painted our WHOLE house, top to bottom (she even did the 30 something foot ceilings in the open two story areas of the house. Imagine my sister Sara and I holding (with our eyes closed) the ladder that mom is on (it is extended nearly vertically to its max to reach the ceiling beam), 30+ feet up, weilding a paint sprayer to get that darn spot she couldn't reach from anywhere else. I really wish I had taken a picture. To my mom's credit, she has also painted 3 or more other houses for my siblings.

At the time, the table we had didn't fit the breakfast nook, so we took the ramshackle table that we found abandoned in the garage and the sun beaten benches we found on the back patio and refinished them. They turned out pretty well! Both the refrigerator and stove almost immediately died on us, so they got replaced too. The ugly black dishwasher wouldn't go for another three years when, giving up on the hope that it would just die, Joe bought me another one (white) for my birthday just a few months ago. He decided it was time to be able to carry on a conversation at normal volume while the dishwasher was going. Being the handy woman I am, and hating to pay labor, I figured out how to install it myself! (How hard could it be, right? - It actually was pretty easy, undo the pipes from the old one and redo them onto the new ones in the same place. The only obstacle that I ran into was that the hole to remove the dishwasher was smaller than it had been when it was installed thanks to flooring and granite, I had to tear it apart to get the darn thing out, thankfully the new one went in much easier.)

We lived with the kitchen in this state for several months but I just couldn't reconcile mysef to the cupboards. One day, when looking at a resurfacing brocure I had a brilliant idea (if I say so myself)! I could buy wainscoting and install it as paneling onto the recessed surface of my cupboards! Then I could caulk the transition, repaint, add concealed hinges and new hardware and.... wala! Here are the beginnings of the wainscote installation - you may have to enlarge the picture to see the wainscoting and where I haven't caulked the transitions yet.

So then with a little more paint on the cupboards and walls, we got this (the wainscoting is hard to appreciate without enlarging the pics):

Oh, and Joe and I added some crown moulding to give it a little more of a custom look. Joe (successfully) tried his hand at his first electrical project with some recessed lighting in the new trim. In this last picture above you can still see the lighting hanging down where it hasn't been fished through the ceiling yet.

So naturally, all that is driving me crazy with the kitchen is that horrid looking, impossible to clean tile countertop. Nice countertops are so expensive... So that first fall in the house I randomly found a link on craigslist to a company in China... and for about $2500 (including shipping and our own installation costs) we got granite for our whole house, including bathrooms, AND Lolly's entire condo. It was quite a project. I had to draw each piece in Word with dimensions and desired edges. After several months of communicating with their rep "Amanda" (her chosen English name) over MSN messenger and through email, we deposited half of the money into an account so they could start the fabrication, crossed our fingers and held our breath... four weeks later Amanda sent us some pictures:

This last one is of our island piece, I should have noticed at this point that the shape was more square than rectangular like it should have been... But I didn't, and so we deposited the other half. Now to wait the two months of shipping... and then it came! It came to So. California by way of freighter then on a train to a holding warehouse here in Vegas, until we were able to clear it from customs. Thanks to my uncle Garth and his big tough truck and a hired Mexican he happend to be employing for the day, the crate finally made it to our garage and was unloaded, piece by piece. A few of the long skinny pieces were broken (mostly backsplash and one top we had ordered for our pony wall), but all of the main pieces were intact and beautiful. I couldn't wait to get them installed, so I did the first smallest one myself the next day! I sent these two pictures to Joe at work right after I finished. Tile demolition, by the way, is VERY messy... and we had some touch-up to do behind the new backsplash.

This is a happy and excited granite-loving wife.

Joe got me a great new deep single bowl kitchen sink (the size of two but with no divider in the middle). Deciding it wasn't worth the time or effort to try to get new pieces, we simply installed the broken pieces (we were able to conceal the breaks) and tried to figure out how to deal with the too large island.

For the island, we opted to build out the base on three sides. We purchased an upper cabinet (they aren't as deep as lowers- we wanted to leave enough overhang for barstools) and built a base for it which we backed up to the existing island. Then I built (from scratch) two pullout garbages for each side of the island (LOVE them). We also added four inches to the height to make using it less back-breaking for Joe and I (effectively cutting the number of any future potential buyers by half or more). Here it is under construction.

I'll have to post a picture of our finished island, apparently I haven't taken one yet!

And that's it! The kitchen!

In the end, when it is all said and done, it would be much easier to just buy the house already done ...and maybe next time we will. But turning this house into our home has been such a gratifying project (now that the work is done) that I wouldn't change the experience for anything.