Manic cleaning/organizing on a Thursday night

In addition to laundry, cleaning the house, doing the dishes, and organizing the kitchen, I cut out these squishy shelf liners for all the drawers and shelves in the kitchen. I also loaded the kitchen cabinets with food, dishes, and other kitchen stuff. Very fancy!

The last two weeks, I've walked around piles of laundry, let the dishes pile up in the sink, and swept crumbs off the counters onto the floor. Last night, I caught up on everything in a burst of energy right before CRASHING to sleep. Looking pretty good around the house, if I do say..

It's a kitchen! And color! Whoa!

So, “beeswax polish night” turned into “beeswax polish week.” It turns out, the beeswax I used made the counters look like someone had peed all over them..just kind of generally yellow with bright yellow spots where the grout holes are.

I will say this, the countertop was super smooth and shiny after the beeswax. It just had that...urine..tint to it I wasn't crazy about :)

Not what you’re 'going for' in a kitchen.

I’m still confused by that because everything I’ve read has said beeswax is the way to go – all natural, food-safe, blah blah blah. So, I don’t know if I got the wrong kind of beeswax, or if there’s more than one type? Again, because nothing out there is really specifically marketed to concrete countertops, no one at any hardware store knows ANYTHING about making them or what to sell you to finish them.

My giant beeswax. I chopped it up and melted it down so I could remove any impurities, many of those were just stuck on the outside, though. I wonder if there's a lighter colored beeswax that wouldn't yellow? I should have known this one would - being yellow to begin with and all.. 

Oh well. A little wax remover and a couple days of random, half-hearted sanding here and there and it all worked out.

We set the tops in place a few days ago and I’ll seal them in the near future. Not as convenient this way, but the show must go on.

Speaking of the show going on: I’ve got cupboard doors and drawer fronts! I’ve even got knobs and pulls! And a sink! And a dishwasher! Holy freaking moly!

Giving everything a test fit. Of course, it had nothing to do with my need to take pictures of everything..

Coming together!

A place for everything! Now I'll just finish painting the cabinets and we'll really be in business!

I called my favorite local plumber – the crew that installed my new furnace/AC/water heater – and he had all of the above knocked out in a couple hours. He also installed a new outside spigot for my hose, and hooked up the garbage disposal. For the first time ever, I was really happy to be doing dishes J


The maiden voyage. I was making sure the dishwasher wouldn't explode and figured I'd get the hang of my giant faucet in the meantime. Big fan of this sink!

 I’ve also picked out some paint – I’m just in the process of deciding where it will go. My friend Anna is coming over this afternoon to paint. She volunteered, I accepted. Things are going to start looking a lot different very soon! :D

The brown in the upper left will go in the living room, the blue in the dining room, and I haven't totally decided on the other colors. Suggestions?

Superbase

This weekend was the last I’ll see of the dogs for a while. The parents made it back from Texas late Friday night, and took the dogs Saturday afternoon. I took lunch over to their place and we got a game plan for the weekend.

My little carpentry project last weekend: lining the closet with wood, hanging shelves, and painting. One or two more coats should do it..the roommate got antsy to move her things back in..

Dad and I decided we’d like to get started hanging the baseboard. And while the thought was nice, the execution was going to drive me crazy.

For a while now, every time I’ve gone to look for something it has miraculously gone missing... either because I’m a crazy person or because everyone puts things in a different place when they’re done. So, rather than wander the house for an hour looking for tape measures and things like that, we decided to clean and organize the garage as it has needed it for quite a while.

You can tell we cleaned, right?

Believe me, it's so much better than it was!

We finished up with that project and had dinner at my place. Take-out = no dishes.

Sunday morning, I got the chance to work on my surround sound system a bit. I ordered a system through our local Radio Shack and it came in! I started putzing around with it Friday on my lunch break, but quickly decided that I was probably going to need to focus on this project for longer than the extra 25 minutes I had at the time. In addition to the speakers, I bought a kit that will mount each unit to the ceiling and orient the speakers so the sound hits me in the teeth while I’m sitting on the couch J

Tiny rear surround speaker. It rocks :)

We had computer speakers rigged up to the TV for sound. Shouldn't need those anymore!

Dad stopped over just in time to lend a hand with this project and it went together pretty smoothly.

After that, we got to work on the baseboard. After messing with the table saw for a bit, we got to work and got quite a bit done considering we were sort of learning as we went along.

This is what we were up against..

Because the floors slope toward the front of the house (remember, my “greenhouse” was originally a porch.. and the floor still sheds water!), we thought for a while about the best way to hang the baseboard. I decided that I’d like the trim to be at the same level all the way through the house. Whether that’s the easy way to do it or the hard way, I don’t know.. Anyway, I bought 8” and 10” baseboard so that we would have plenty of excess board when scribing it to the variations in the floor.

We still need to lay some quarter-round along the bottom to hide any gaps, but it already looks so much better!

We got to the point where we’ll have to switch over to the 10” boards before calling it a night. More work on this tonight, I imagine.

One corner hung, waiting for holes to be filled and sanded. See the need for quarter-round here?

And you can see the floor sinking slightly here. The closer you get to the front door, the more the floor drops. We've got taller boards to make up the difference.

As I write this, Dad is on his way to the store to pick up materials for cabinet-making! We measured everything before he left for Texas, and once the baseboard is hung, we should have room in the garage to build a few boxes. Pictures and posts to follow…wish us luck! J

This is what the door/drawer fronts should look like (we hope!) when done. They'll be painted the same white as the trim, door jambs, and fireplace brick. Again, wish us luck :)