The Kitchen!

The kitchen remodeling has been much slower than we thought it was going to be. . . mostly because it was an old house and we kept running into more things that needed to be fixed. Thank goodness that my dad was here to help with the plumbing and the electric. We seriously could not have done this w/o him! Andy has experience with cabinets, but when it comes to electricity and plumbing, we are completely in the dark.
I am so grateful for my dad and his sacrificing his precious vacation time to come out to PA to help us. He is the best! My mom has been a great help with watching the boys so I could go help my dad while Andy was at work. The kitchen is almost done. I will show a *before and after* photo after we are finished.

Kitchen...almost complete

Here is a panoramic picture of our kitchen. You have to click on it in order to get the full effect. We still have to put in the toe-kick and the knobs/handles. Also, we have to put in a spacer in between the wall cabinet and the oven cabinet. Here is a sample picture of our countertop.

Men at Work

Isn't modern technology amazing? I had called my dad late Tuesday night, and by Wednesday afternoon I was pikcing him up from the airport. It took the pioneers literally months to travel less distance than what it took my dad to fly in just over four hours. I am so grateful that he had the rest of the week off work. And I am so grateful for frequent flyer miles that Andy and I had been saving for an emergency. Our kitchen was an emergency.
That first evening, Dad worked on the plumbing for the kitchen sink. Harrison loved being able to help his Pappy.

On Thursday, Andy had to go into the office for a couple hours. Meanwhile, Dad worked on the wiring for the oven hood. He had it finished by lunch time when Andy came home. They then secured the base cabinets to the wall and put on the countertop.
Don't you love how they secured the countertop? I took this picture when they weren't looking. I thought it was a great action shot. :D That evening, they cut the hole for the sink.
On Friday, Dad sealed the sink and installed the dishwasher. All we have to do now is put the trim on and the drawer/door handles. What a life-saver my dad is! Thank you for coming!
(I'll post pictures of the finished product once we get our dishes, etc, put away.)

Progress...

Ta-Da! Here it is. The new floor! Andy and I were so excitd to see it. (I ran errands with the boys to keep them out of the floor-man's way.) When we got home that night and saw the floor, we just kept walking back and forth over it. It was so pretty!

One more thing to add on to this kitchen adventure...I forgot that I was supposed to babysit my nieces while my sister-in-law took a much needed, week-long vacation to California. (Michael bought Sarah a plane ticket to CA to visit a friend for a week. What a nice present, right?) Anyway, I had the girls from Wednesday night to Thursday night. Believe it or not, the kids were great, despite the huge mess that consists of our house.
Since I had no way to cook dinner for them, I took them out to eat at a local pizza buffet because kids 3 and under eat free. Where else could all of us eaten for $10? Andy was at a closing in Gettysburg until 7:30PM, so I was solo with 5 kids under age six. You should have SEEN the looks I got when I walked in to that place. The kids were so good, though, that when we were finished eating, an elderly couple came up to our table and told me how good my kids were. Wasn't that sweet of them? The kids all got an ice-cream cone as a reward (plus, it was part of the buffet.)
Here are the wall cabinets......things are progressing! Andy and Michael put these up Thursday night when Michael came to pick up the girls.
Here is a completed wall cabinet with the doors and with the CD/Radio. Andy just set the countertop on top of the base cabinets, just to see how it will look. We still need to attach the base cabinets to the walls and then cut the hole in the counter-top for the sink.
We are getting closer to being finished. Andy and I walk into the kitchen often to just stare at it. We can't believe the transformation.

The sub-floor and painting

Here is the sub-floor!!! I painted Sunday afternoon (last Sunday) since we only had sacrament meeting. The rest of church was cancelled due to the snow storm.


I tried enlisting the boys to help me paint the trim in the dining room. (I needed something to keep them busy so that Ewan could nap.) Harrison, as you can see, took the paint-job very seriously.
Zane, on the other hand, was more interested in painting his hands than the wall. The total amount of time that I had them help lasted about 20 minutes before I threw them into the shower.

Last Saturday

We finished ripping apart the rest of the kitchen today. I had a mini-breakdown this morning before everyone came over to help. I am so excited to get the kitchen finished, but this journey has been rough. I told Andy this morning that he goes to work everyday, while I am home with 3 boys and trying to keep them out of all of the chaos. I almost lost it Friday night when Harrison and Zane were poking me with sticks. (They thought it was funny and the sticks were easily accessible.)
Here is a picture of my living room/temporary kitchen and dining room.

I have always believed that a tidy home made it easier to feel the spirit, now I have such a strong testimony of it! My kids have been out of control these past two weeks and it has been stressing me out. (I know he is hard to spot, but that is Zane with the Bob the Builder sleeping bag in the middle of the room in that picture.)
The ironic thing about this whole kitchen venture is that the person who initially installed our old cabinets was named Andy, too. Can you see that "Andy's" is written on the back?

Here is Andy and Lindsey ripping out the Pergot floor from the dining room. They had to rip it up in large pieces. Lindsey would use a shovel to lift some of it up, then Andy would saw a line in order for her to lift it up the rest of the way. There were four layers of flooring: Pergot, vinyl, sub-floor, and another layer of vinyl. It was quite the job. I have never liked that Pergot floor, even when we first bought the house. It wasn't installed properly. The sides of the wood didn't match up. Zane once tripped on the floor and one of the uneven pieces cut his cheek. It left a tiny scar. Good-bye floor...forever!




Andy and Michael went to town ripping out the cabinets. One minor problem occured when they were ripping out the sink cabinet (pictured above) and one of the pipes broke. They were able to shut the water off really fast before our basement flooded, but they got soaked!

One cabinet gone, 15 more to go. . .

While I was at book club, Michael came over and he and Andy started demolishing the cabinets.
What color do you think? From top to bottom, they are named: Khaki, Natural, Wicker, and Latte. We are leaning towards Wicker, with Latte for the trim.

Causalties of painting with young children.

Our Kitchen???

The boys (minus Ewan) spent the night at Andy's parent's home on Friday night. We woke early Saturday to drive down to IKEA to pick up our kitchen. It only took us 45 minutes to get our van out of the ice on the road. It has been so cold here. I think the high this entire week has been 22 degrees. All of the cabinets fit inside our van. It was quite the heavy load on the way home.

FROM THIS

TO THIS

Here is a sample picture of our cabinets from the IKEA website. We have a U-shaped kitchen and will have a different color counter-top.

Here is our dining room. We have started to prime the walls. I loved the olive green color, but we got tired of it pretty quickly. I think we are going to go with something more natural-looking, like a light oatmeal color with white for the trim. That way, we won't have to repaint when we are ready to sell the house.
For Andy, it was like Christmas. He couldn't wait to start assembling our cabinets. We plan on assembling most of the cabinets in the basement so they will be out of the way. We'll assemble the corner cabinets in the dining room because they won't fit up the stairs once they are assembled.
Zane wanted to pose in front of the first assembled cabinet. I don't know why he is pulling a "Popeye" face. He really is turning into quite a character.

This is the cabinet that will go above the stove. The interior of all of the cabinets will be birch, but the doors and drawer fronts will be a medium-brown color.

Under Construction

As you can see, I have made major changes to my blog. To make a long story even longer, I couln't get my sidebar to go to the side, where it is supposed to be. It kept showing up at the bottom. I tried adding a < / d i v >. It showed up correctly on my preview, but when I pulled up my blog by typing in the website, the sidebar was still on the bottom of my blog.
So, I tried to change the template (as you can see) and my sidebar is still on the bottom.
I did save all of my sidebar info (links, etc) in html in an email to myself, so I will be adding that eventually.
If you have any suggestions, please help!

UPDATE**
Ok, I was able to get everything back to normal, but I still can't get my sidebar to go to the top right. I keep adding < / d i v >, but all that does is just move my sidebar around the bottom of the page.
Does anyone know html? I am so annoyed at this.

*************UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE****************
Ok, I think I finally figured out where I needed to put the < /d i v >
Please tell me my blog looks normal.

****final update*********
My sidebar is still at the bottom. This is so annoying. Does anyone know of any websites where I can learn about html??

The Floor

Here are some updated pictures of our kitchen...

Andy taking out the counter-top by the window.


Who else can say they got help from Superman?
I went grocery shopping and came home to no kitchen floor. (Andy was very excited to rip the tile out, even though the floor man isn't coming for two weeks. We will just put rugs down.)
Here are the destroyers: Sarah, Michael, and Andy.

Catching Up...

I found this label stuck to my kitchen counter this morning. I thought it was a cute, creative way to leave a love note. Thanks Andy! It made my day. :D



As for this week, we are all pretty much healthy now. I'm glad to be rid of that cold! I have been teaching seminary this week as a substitute. It has been BITTERLY cold in the mornings. This morning, our school district called for a 2 hour delay because it was so cold and there was 1 inch of snow on the ground. Seminary was cancelled, so I went back to bed for some much needed zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz's.

The pictures that are about to follow are pretty graphic, so you might need to cover your eyes. These are pictures of our kitchen. It is literally falling apart. Thanks to Uncle Sam and our tax return, we are getting ready to re-do our kitchen!!! After 2 1/2 years of living with a dilapidated kitchen, I am so excited!

I guess these drawer-fronts do kind of look like ladders. The boys have had a great time using them for that purpose. These cabinets are so old, that they are just literally falling apart. Andy, having some experience in the cabinets industry, tried to fix them, but the drawers are stripped. They have already been turned around once.
The same thing happened to our silverware drawer.
And the tile wasn't laid right, so we have had cracks for two years. We'll be ripping this up in the next couple weeks.
Finally, our lovely vine and watermelon wallpaper is going to GO! We started removing it on Saturday. Thank goodness for wallpaper steamers. It is the ONLY way to remove this stuff.



I'll definitely be keeping a log of this major home transformation. We plan on getting new cabinets, countertops, and new flooring in the kitchen and the dining room. I'm already looking forward to it being finished because the idea of having my kitchen torn apart for a couple weeks is going to be completely chaotic. It will be worth it, though.