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..

Walls closing in...

Busy weekend!

So busy, in fact, we were able to have all the cabinets hung and set by the time Sunday afternoon rolled around... even after taking Saturday off. Thanks to the adjustable cabinet legs my parents picked up at IKEA on their Texas trip, installation was pretty easy! All you’ve got to do is set the box in place and check it for level and plumb every which way. Check that each face is in line with the adjacent cabinet’s face, lock it in place with a couple screws and you’ve got it made.

I'm road-testing an island. I like the added prep space, but I wonder if it's too big?

All set! Making counter tops, cabinet doors, and drawers over the next few days.

It’s been so long since there have been cabinets in this kitchen – it’s starting to look so small comparatively! That said, it will be a good day when I don’t have to look at all of my groceries out in the open all the time J

Up, up, and away!

Quick picture update from our progress last night: more upper cabinets!!

An addition to the large cabinet seen in the post yesterday. It should look good with a pair of doors, don't you think? All the cabinets will get another coat of paint before I'll be totally happy with them, but for now I think they look just fine! :)

All of them, actually. All that’s left now is the hood over the range, but that’s a project for another day. 

These are the upper cabinets on either side of the range hood that doesn't yet exist. The cabinet on the left has shelves that are set back a few inches to accomodate a spice rack that hangs on the inside of the door.  

As you can see, I really don’t have that many cabinets, but we had to find the wiring we left wound up in the wall for the under cabinet lighting. So between that and the fact the neither my dad nor myself had hung cabinets, I think we made pretty good progress in an hour and a half J

I didn't get a picture of the cabinet hanging in the other corner over the hypothetical dishwasher, but once you've seen one, you've seen them all. The backsplash area behind the stove will be covered with a piece of stainless steel, and I'll wrap the stove-sides of the upper cabinets with it, too. Should be pretty snazzy!

This weekend is a busy one – I’ll be volunteering Saturday morning for a large, community-wide service project, and there’s a graduation party for a family friend that night..so my guess is there won’t be a lot of base cabinet setting happening that day. Tonight and Sunday might be productive, though…I guess we’ll all just have to wait and see!

CABINETS!

So, you’ve seen pictures of the cabinets during assembly out in the garage… how about one up on the wall?

That's a bad mamma jamma-sized cabinet.

Yep, last night was a pretty big night in my kitchen. No food was made, but I learned how to hang a cabinet and prep for the under-cabinet lighting I bought at IKEA a while back. More on lighting to come.

I’ll admit, I haven’t been terrific about taking pictures of the cabinets throughout the process. I blame this on the fact that their construction goes pretty quickly and I don’t have many opportunities to take pictures. That said, I will have plenty of updates as we hang more of the upper cabinets tonight.

I'm keeping the same basic layout (the new sink will be centered on the windows, though). Notice the older upper cabinets didn't reach all the way to the ceiling; I hope the taller uppers will look more in keeping with the age of the house, while providing more storage.



Pre-hanging. You can kind of see the paneling on the exposed side of the cabinet - this is something I've seen in magazines for the last couple years. It looks older, but also a little more "custom." Hopefully it will look like someone built these by hand...in a GOOD way!

 On my lunch break, I went out looking for countertop-making supplies. My boss – the same guy that tought me how to lay tile – has made concrete countertops before, and I’ve wanted to learn for quite a while. In the next few days/weeks, I hope to be building forms and working through that process, so stick around and learn with us!

Kitchen Cabinets

We’ve been working on a pretty big project for the last few weeks. Actually, we’ve been actively working on it for the last week and a half or so.  The rest has been mostly mental work..strategy and such. We made big progress this weekend, though!

The big project I’m referring to is cabinetry. Kitchen cabinetry. We’ve been pretty methodical about it, and we’re seeing light at the end of the tunnel! In all honesty, I don’t think it’s taken a terribly long time given the number of steps it takes to convert a sheet of material into the container I trust to hold my food, but Dad has been worrying about this for a while. This project is kind of his baby and he doesn’t want to mess it up.

Understandably so.

In the past, he worked with a custom cabinet maker on the side, so he’s got an idea of how it should work. That said, when he worked for this guy, Dad didn’t draw up the plans or install the cabinets once they were finished. So..he’s worried.

I’m not. We’ll be fine. We’re taking our time for a reason. The old ‘measure twice, cut once’ thing? We’re doing that, and usually having a conversation about each cut before, during, and after making it. If the cabinets are messed up, it’s our fault..not his. I suppose another good thing about building your own cabinets is that if they don’t fit you can make one that does. But what a pain that would be..

Anyway, here are a few pictures of our organized chaos in the garage. The cabinets in these pictures are the base units – since these shots were taken, those have all been primed and painted with a sprayer and stored in the enclosed porch until we’re ready for them. In the meantime, we’ve cut, primed and painted the pieces for the upper cabinets and should start assembling those in the next few days, or as his work schedule allows.

As I said, organized chaos.

Base cabinet boxes assembled, working on their face frames.

Cabinet with face frame. This will have a swing door..I think this size cabinet goes on either side of the oven.

Sanding the face frame for the cabinets with drawers. Very cool!

We’ll hang the uppers first, and then set the base cabinets – they’re easier to install that way. Once everything is set, we can measure for cabinet doors and counter tops, which I look forward to learning how to make out of concrete J

Wish us luck!

Hodge-podge

This is one of those ‘catch-all’ blogs I do that pertain to everything and nothing all at once.

The first part of that is me being a creeper and taking random pictures of random people’s property J I went on a little farm visit late last week for work – I had to take pictures of the houses and outbuildings on the property to satisfy my underwriters, and ended up deciding I might like to be a farmer if I could be a farmer on this particular farm.

Maybe I'm just too big a city-boy, but I don't know many of you who have cool little 100-year-old water towers in your yard. Or playhouses.. these are cool grandparents :)

This spring has really gotten to me for some reason. It’s unseasonably warm, everything is in bloom, the sun is shining, the breeze is blowing just enough to mess your hair and it’s amazing. Something about this old farm – and Iowa in general – just struck me as being the coolest place in the world at that particular moment. It has been in operation by the same family for over a hundred years and it has just the right amount of character that comes from 50 layers of paint and thousands of feet shuffling across the front porch. Luckily, the owner was happy to show it off J

I didn't know what this bush was? Fire engine red blooms. Like I said, this spring is getting to me.

Back on my homestead..

The baseboard project has gone really well! I have designated myself as the outside corner master. Inside corners..not so much, but we’ve decided “That’s why God made wood putty.” When it’s all painted and sanded, it looks really great..just like it’s been there forever J Pictures to come!

After a long Saturday of crawling around on the floor with the baseboard project, I decided to walk up the block to the brewery to take in the music. I hadn’t shown you the brewery yet, so I snapped a picture. Good beer, good music, no manual labor. It was a great night!

The Brewery in all its live music glory.

Dad and I worked most of the morning yesterday leveling out the backyard and making the back of the neighboring apartment building’s garage look less like a bomb had gone off near it. The latter of which turned into kind of a neighborhood effort: we raked the brush and pulled some old wood out away from the building, the neighbors came by to help haul stuff away, and a friend brought by some hosta splits from her garden. I watered them in last night and again this morning..we’ll see how they do!

My backyard was less a neighborhood effort, and more sweat on Dad and my part. Since my concrete man laid my driveway and the footings/slab for the garage, we’ve had these piles of dirt/gravel lying around. He offered to level everything out for us, but we borrowed our neighbors tiller and got after it. It looks much nicer than before, and it should be ready for homegrown produce whenever I am. …which could be a while, but it’s a nice thought.

Today, I’m back to work, but Dad has the day off and decided to build a prototype cabinet for the kitchen. We’ve got the materials and many of the tools..now if we could prove our measurements are correct we’ll be off and running!

It looks like a cabinet, right? Actually, shortly after I took this, Dad put its feet on and it looked much more convincing. We'll work on drawer slides soon and after a few more boxes come together we'll cut out a face frame..and it will be glorious.

More cabinets tonight, I imagine..and more pictures to follow!

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 :)