Downstairs Remodel- Day 2

I am writing this blog post throughout the day, so if it seems a little choppy, that's why.

Day 2 of our remodel started with a trip to the Depot to get some basic supplies like wood, sandpaper, paint rollers, etc. That trip cost less than I was afraid that it would. We left the Depot, dropped our supplies off, and went to Benjamin Moore to get primer and paint for the cabinets. Holy expletive Batman! I was glad that the Depot trip was less than expected because that trip to BM... it was NOT cheap! This primer and paint better jump up on the cabinets by themselves when I open the buckets. Anyway, after we sucked down our Mickey D's, it was time to get to work. Henry had already taken the doors off the cabinets while I was at an ortho appt (he says at least 2 more appts, so maybe I'll get them off Summerish- his terms, not mine) so when I got back, I took off the hinges and started sanding. He cut plywood to cover the contact paper that the lovely cabinet makers chose to put on the sides of our cabinets instead of wood. We have puttied holes and cracks in the cabinets and they are drying. Henry sanded the cabinet frames. :) What a nice guy!

We had this crazy quarter round at the top of our backsplash because the wall is so uneven that it left a gap. We learned about this gap when we removed the quarter round because I think it looks cheap and like a half hearted attempt to upgrade. The crack was so big in some spots that even caulk wouldn't fill it because it would fall down before it got the chance. What to do? Henry had this brilliant idea that we could get spray foam! Brilliant I say! I used said foam to fill the big gaps. When it's dry we will apply caulk over it and do a little paint magic to make it look like the counter top goes all the way back to the wall, at least that is our plan.

I should mention that we have used baby gates to block off the kitchen/dining room from the rest of the house, and we have hung sheets up in an attempt to keep the dust contained. We have also been reading that young house love blog thing and we are attempting to follow their directions on cabinet painting. We could not get their recommended brand of de-glosser or primer, so we got another brand instead. Here's hoping that it works as well. 

I think that we have decided to break up this huge downstairs remodel into sections so that it isn't so overwhelming. This week we really hope to get the ceilings painted, and the cabinets primed and painted. I think we are going to order the new hinges and handles tonight. Maybe next month, we will paint the walls and trim. It's all the little things that add up and become a time drain. That is why our deadline is Thanksgiving. I will just be pleasantly surprised if it is done before then.

So at 7:30 this evening, we were attempting to sand the edges of our cabinet doors, by hand, on this crazy curvy surface when it hit me, they make a tool for this! I mean just for this! Why in the world were we doing it by hand?!?! I dashed back to the Depot and purchased "The Mouse". We tested it out and it's so much easier than doing it by hand with a tiny scrap of paper. I will finish the edges tomorrow. Tonight we are ordering the hardware! Woot.

Tonight I'm feeling a little relieved that we have really started and we've made good progress. I will post pics soon, but honestly I'm just too tired to do it tonight. 

Downstairs remodel- DAY 1

Today is Wednesday, and Henry has taken Thursday and Friday off work, as well as all of next week. We have made a short list of projects that we'd like to complete during that time, and since the boys will be out of school for Spring Break, they will go to my mom's so that we can really tear through some of this. Kinsley goes to the neighbor's on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and she still takes a nap each day. We are hoping to keep her and the dog out of paint. We shall see. Anyway, since he will be off tomorrow, we plan to:

1. Sand the cabinets
2. Check out and purchase paint
3. Purchase cabinet trim
4. Do a little work to the cabinets before we paint them

That means that today's project is to clear out the space. I'm packing up the kitchen. I'm not doing a super job as I'm only moving things to the living room and they will only have to be there... a week+? No more than 2 weeks I hope. I would also like to remove the cabinet doors and drawers. I have started packing already, and I'm choosing to take this opportunity to purge and clean. I'll be honest, I don't clean on top of the cabinets very often, and I've already found some tupperware without lids. Straight to the trash for those items. I'm sure that I'll find things I forgot I had. I am not ashamed to admit that I am using plastic bags to "pack" plastic or non breakable things.
I should also add that Kinsley's birthday is Friday and her party is Saturday. Henry asked if I wanted to wait until after that  to start all this, but there's no time like the present and we need to utilize all of the time we have so that this remodel doesn't go on forever. Some of the details are already likely to get put off until a later date. (I have this crazy detail plan for the stairs but shhhhh). Besides, our families know that this is how we roll and I'd rather them see progress than more of the same ;) We actually started little bits of renovation last week, but I'll blog about them later. In case I didn't say it before, I am NOT looking forward to these renovations because I know it's going to take a looong time, but it's time to get them done. Today, I'm feeling hopeful that it will go faster and easier than I think it might.

Post post note
Things I found while cleaning out the cabinets

1. We have lots of beer and wine glasses, though I'm not sure why. We also have NO margaritta glasses, but I plan to remedy that after this is all over with and I purchase some to celebrate our success.
2. We have alot of medications in the cabinets. I'm not sure why they are in the kitchen, probably for convenience.
3. Caramel Marshmallows
4. 2 count them, 2 GIANT chocolate bars. Please don't revoke my girl card for having forgotten chocolate in the house. 
5. Attachments for my stand mixer. Now these weren't lost as I haven't been looking for them, but it is good to know where they are, er, were.
6. Random kitchen gadgets that I don't ever use but have "just in case". I might get rid of some of these in the yard sale we intend to have soon. 
7. Gumbo base, SCORE!
8. Random condiments, I'm checking expiration dates...

The Great Kitchen Remodel gets underway

It's been a long time since I have blogged, but honestly I've been too busy to do it and with facebook, you can basically blog all day every day so the need for an actual cohesive blog seems to fall to the wayside. Someday I'll write about what I've been doing for the last year, but until then here is what I'm doing NOW. It is now time for the kitchen remodel to resume. We took time off because we were sick of it and we wanted to do other things, and we had Kinsley, and I started a small embroidery business and life in general happened. I guess that is what we've been doing in a nutshell. Anyway, we have ambitions for this remodel to be finished in time to have Thanksgiving dinner Griswold style at our house this year. I told him that I would agree to that IF the first floor remodel was done. So that's how we got our goal. We made a super long list of things that we'd like to get done, and tried to include as many details as possible. We are upgrading everything that you will see downstairs. The ceilings, walls, and trim are getting repainted, as well as the cabinets (YAY!) and the half bath, stairway and hall. I would like to paint the laundry room maybe, but we'll see. We hope to upgrade/add some lighting, and finish the whole thing up with... wait for it... NEW FLOORING!!! That has been bumped lower on the list for long enough. I am so sick of shampooing the carpet, but so grateful to my mom for donating her carpet cleaner to my cause. I plan to blog about out progress every day, but sometimes things happen and I won't get to it. I hope that you all enjoy seeing the progress as much as we will enjoy the finished product. Are you ready? Here we go..........

A Remodeling Plan Remodeled

As time goes on, our remodeling plan keeps changing. We discussed the next phase of remodeling the other day, and decided that instead of throwing money at the house in the form of new parts and pieces, we would rather make small changes on the house and throw money at the mortgage instead. We figure that since we have small kids and really can't have anything nice anyway, we might as well wait until they are older before we really spiff up the place. I was planning to replace the cabinets this fall, but instead, I will just be refinishing them. I still want to rip out the carpet downstairs ASAP, so I'm still holding on to the hope that it will happen sooner rather than later. I know that it helps with the echo and falls and such, but honestly I just want to walk on a floor that I know is clean. I'm also planning to make major minor changes in the office in the form of paint, and this carpet HAS to go! I'm sure that some day we will get the house like we want it, but I guess progress comes in many forms, and this is the one that ours is taking right now.

The Name Game

Going along with my previous post, I thought I'd share a little bit of my experience with one particular aspect of naming a baby that I like to call "the lineage effect". As I stated before, Henry and I played the deal breaker game when we were dating. You might recall that one of his items was that he wanted to have at least one child of his own. What I didn't mention before was that if the child was a boy, he wanted to name it Henry, no middle name, just Henry. My Henry doesn't have a middle name, nor does his father or his father or... you get the picture. What they do have is a suffix. My father in law, who goes by Hank so as to not be confused with his father, Henry, is a Jr. I think his father was a Jr. as well. My Henry is an III. The story goes that he was to be named Jr. but his parents were told that the hospital didn't allow you to name a Jr.'s junior a Jr, so they had to name him the third instead. Hank's argument was that he was a Jr., and his dad was a Jr., so why not? :) Anyway, years after my Henry was born, some family tree stuff was done and it was determined that he was in fact not the third, but the sixth. That's right, XI not III. So given this information, he wanted to name his son Henry XII in order to correct the lineage suffix thing. My argument to this was that wouldn't our Henry wonder what happened to IX, X, and XI? Anyway, I agreed to this naming thing even though I thought it was ridiculous. My secret plan was to work in a middle name if we ever had a boy. ssshhh!
A couple of years later, we were pregnant and the whole name thing came up. I fought tooth and nail to end this string of only Henrys, and I petitioned for a middle name. My argument was that it was still the same blood line even if the name Henry wasn't anywhere in his name, and record would show that the line lived on regardless. I got a long story about how the original Henry moved to this particular area and so on and so on, and about how the name didn't mean anything here but it did there. I was even driven up to the top of this crazy high hill by means of this tiny little road (think about those crazy roads on the side of a mountain and add in a tree lined dirt road factor) in the freezing weather so that I could see this monument that was erected in his honor. Still, the thrill of carrying on the exact name with a numerically climbing suffix didn't appeal to me. My Henry was extremely firm on this namimg issue and thus our first serious argument. He was mad, something I hadn't seen up to that point as he's really laid back and easy going. I liked the name Henry for him, but it seemed like an old name to tag a new kid with. I was ok with it as a first name as long as the kid had a middle name that was something cool and not as drab as Henry. This became a mini family feud as his family backed him and I felt like the wicked witch. They were extremely adamant about it, which made me hate it even more. My family doesn't do things like that really, and if they do it's in conjunction with another name that the kid actually goes by. If I was forced to passon this name, I was going to have a son with a name that I hated. My resistance had nothing to do with the people it was associated with, it was on principle alone. Some people would think this lineage name was cool, and admittedly it is a very hard thing to carry on as long as this one has been going unless you are some sort of nobleman, but I was not one of them. I didn't mind being the one to end this over extended name thing, a name change was long over due in my eyes. 
My moment of triumph came when we found out we were having a girl. At last the argument would end, and I would win by default if by no other means. I was ok with that. Kinsley was born, and months and months went by. I think it was my love for his father that finally saw the tide start to turn. I started pondering that maybe the name wasn't so bad. Maybe an old name in a rebellious society filled with cheap made up names was a good thing. Maybe it would seperate him from the rest. Maybe Henry was a cool name afterall, it's even gaining popularity again. The wheels started to turn as I felt more like a member of their family instead of just someone who married in. I started to embrace the name, and realize that it was more about a tribute to those who have meant something to us rather than just some weird tradition. Today, I embrace this lineage name. I'm not sure if we're going to have any more kids, but if we do, and if it's a boy, he will be named Henry with eagerness, pride, and respect. I will say that I dread it for his son who would be Henry the VIII, but I'm sure very very few people will know the words to that song by then. ;) -Kellie-

Are we done yet?

This is a question that Henry and I have been trying to figure out with regard to children for more than the last year. Let me start by giving you a little history here. When Henry and I started dating, I had been married before and had two boys, then ages 3 and 15 mos ( about the age Kinsley is now). Before we got too seriously involved in a relationship with each other, we played what we jokingly called "the deal breaker game" whereby one of us would say "this is just how I am/things have to be" and if the other couldn't handle it, then we would seriously consider walking away from the relationship in the super early stages so that we could all escaped relatively unscathed. One of his requirements was that he wanted at least one child (maybe two) of his own. That was a big thing for me to commit to as I was perfectly happy with only having the two I already had, plus no woman in my family has given birth to more than 2 children. I agreed because he was such a sweet guy and I had sort of vaguely pondered having a third anyway, but then my marriage went down hill so it was an issue not even close to on the table. I did specify that I would only have an absolute maximum of 2 more, because 4 kids is bordering on an entire litter. Speed past 3 years, and we had Kinsley. Life was great and about 5 months later we started giving thought to having another. Just thought, don't get excited. We pondered it together, and decided that we wanted to wait a little while to "try on" having 3 kids before we committed to having another. We revisited the issue months later and decided it was still too early to decide on, so we agreed to wait longer and discuss it again. We find that the longer we wait, the more un-compelled we are to have another. This is an issue that we are still coming and going on. It's been great having a baby, and she's cute and fun, but when we think about all those future school functions and baseball games and family vacations and whatever else comes with kids that we haven't even experienced yet, well it's alot and we don't want to sacrifice quality for quantity. We know that if we had more,we'd adapt and it would be the new normal, but being where we are now and thinking about stepping into that is a little daunting. We think about the things we'd sacrifice/ put off if we had another baby. We think about who we are and where we're going and how that would be affected if we had another baby, not to mention that we don't know where we'd put another baby which brings up a whole new set of issues. It sounds like we've talked ourselves out of it, but really it's still on the table somewhere near the edge and in possible danger of being knocked off. I still save everything baby related "just in case", and have been giving some serious thought to that growing pile of stored items. I keep thinking about how much more room we'd have in the attic (and other random areas) if we got rid of it. I keep thinking about how I farm some of it out to my friends with babies so that I don't have to store it, but I don't have to get rid of it either. It's a good deal for all of us really, but I don't want to be a hoarder (because I so could never really be that way, this is a temporary thing for certain) and I don't want to be a baby item loaner location. We've even considered just biting the bullet and having one more so that we could know that we were done because like I said, four is my absolute max unless God feels compelled to test my patience in a most severe manner. I think part of my issue is having a life changing unknown out there. I'm a control freak and I like to have a plan way in advance of what normal people feel is adequate. We are still on the fence about this issue, and not ready to definitely get off in one pasture or the other. It's a tough call, and one that we will probably put off making until we wake up one day and realize that we have slid off the fence. Either way, we will be happy about whatever happens. -Kellie-

I feel like the Jeffersons

You remember that show, or at least the theme song that said "we're movin on up..." That's kinda how I've felt the last couple of weeks. I've already posted about the "granite" in our kitchen and the mostly completed coffee bar, but there are a few other cool changes that have come up lately, planned or otherwise. Our first addition to the kitchen was the fridge. In case you don't know, we went to our parents' for the weekend and when we came back, our fridge was dead. Let me enlighten you to our fridge situations.

The Evolution of the Fridge

Let's start off with the "Bachelor" fridge that we had when we got married. It was the one Henry bought to go in his apartment. I think this one was 16 cubic feet?

After Kinsley was born and started eating baby food (which I made and froze in ice cube trays) the fridge's small size became super apparent. Things started literally falling out of the fridge and freezer every time we opened it. After one particular incident with this, I had had it. I got on craigslist and tried to find one like what we thought we wanted (a freezer on the bottom) at a cheap price. Size was the main issue though. We wound up with this one, that was 22 cubic feet.

 

It filled the space where the fridge is meant to go nicely, and offered the space we needed. The guy we got it from was an appliance repair guy and he got it because it was broken and the "real" part to fix it was more exspensive than a new fridge so he put an "it will work" part in it and resold it. We knew this going in, and he showed up how to adjust it if need be. He also delivered it, installed it, hauled off our old one, and did a "trade" on the fridge so all in all we came out pretty good price wise. The downside to buying a rigged fridge is just that, it's rigged. We are glad that we bought the fridge because it helped us see where we really wanted to go with it. We are very "get something that is a good representation of what you want to see if you like it before you invest the big bucks in the real thing" kind of people. So when we came home and our fridge (but not freezer???) was dead, we were forced to go fridge shopping. Thank God for emergency funds is all I've got to say. We hit the internet to check prices and styles. We went to Lowes- didn't have what we wanted in our price range, Sears- which has the commercial out that is a total lie because their prices were higher AND they were going to charge us $70 to deliver it!!, and Home Depot- jackpot all the way around. I should add that we have gotten all of our appliances thus far at HD because of quality, price, and service. We have even always purchased from the same sales guy. We were fortunate that we were shopping on the 4th of July so SALE! right up front. We found a fridge we loved, and started contemplating color. I had thought white initially because the rest of our appliances (which we want to replace because they are base models) are white, but then I started thinking about the "big picture" and where we wanted to go design wise because we were not getting a new fridge later just to have a different color. I moved my thinking to black because black is usually the same price as white, and the stove I have my eye on (also at HD) is black and stainless. We looked at the stove and chatted for a second and agreed that though black would match better than white, it would be a big black light sucking appliance. We timidly asked how much more it would be for stainless which would reflect light and match the stove better anyway. SCORE! it was the exact same price (though it usually wasn't)! WOOT! We purchased it on the spot and had to wait 3 days for it to be delivered because it was a special order.

So here we have our final fridge purchase for a while I hope. It has a whopping 26 cubic feet of space. Unless I'm lying without knowing it.

It barely fit in the opening, but it looks really nice (just ignore the tiny fingerprints) and it's cold and it's not rigged. The freezer is on the bottom and is a drawer type instead of a door like we had before. one of the cool features it has is that everything except the shelves slides out for easy reach. The freezer has an upper basket that holds the ice and stuff and slides out too. Speaking of ice, you will notice that we did not opt for the ice/water dispenser in the door because that would just be another for the kids to play with. Besides, it took up some of the room inside the fridge which defeated the purpose of getting a huge fridge.

I'm loving the french doors because I can separate my sauces and other items, and it holds both gallons of milk on the same shelf in the door. There are spaces in it that I haven't even put anything in yet. There are 2 fruit/veggie drawers, and that strange drawer on the bottom is a deli drawer that is for meat and cheese. It slides out too. There's also this little rack under the top left shelf that I am pretty sure is supposed to hold cans of soda, but we have cookie dough in it. :) It has an extra shelf, but we took it out to make room for the tall things like pitchers and juice bottles.

We are in love with our new fridge and it makes the kitchen look less crappy eventhough we still have the crappy cabinets. I'm still pondering what I want to do with them until we remodel. I should add that in addition to getting the fridge on sale, and the free stainless upgrade (only the doors are stainless, the rest is regular fridge enamel in gray), we also got credit on our Home Depot Gas card and were able to put gas in our cars for 2.29/ gallon. Sadly there was a 20 gallon limit though :( Still, that was another nice savings. When the fridge was delivered, it had a small dent in the side (it was brand new and supposed to be in a box!) but it was on the side that goes next to the cabinet. The guy said he could either take it back and re-order another one, or give me a credit. You can't see it because of location, it is small (watch the loading will ya'?) and I had been living out of 2 coolers with 3 kids for 3 days. The ice was all melting and we couldn't really buy food so I took the credit which was pretty nice so score once again! I'm still waiting for the refund check.

In addition to the fridge, I also scored a sweet deal from a friend on some lighting.  Here's a couple of before (left) and afters (right).

Now my cool stainless look is carried into the dining room too. I also have a matching light in a different style that I want to install in the stairway, but that is another blog because I need parts and time and help. Stay tuned though ;)  FYI, due to our attempt to reuse everything we take down (at least until we upgrade past it), the crazy black chandelier now lives in the office in place of the lonely light bulb fixture that had no shade or globe because it was originally a garage light. It's nice and bright in there now. I think we might need dimmers for both lights though, it might be just a little too bright...