Apparently, I Have No Pride, part 2

Sunday's the end of the week, right?  That being the case, I'm calling this update right on time which is no small miracle given the state of things around here.  As I mentioned, we're giving our kitchen a little spring refresh.  New countertops, fresh paint, a few needed updates.  Nothing big.  Except it is.  I don't know how people who do actual remodels do it.

We're painting the cabinets ourselves, and our entry, living and dining rooms have been doing double duty as a paint assembly line.  We have 21 cabinet doors, and each one required sanding, priming and two coats of paint.  Front and back.  Mr. flyskim took care of the sanding, but I've been in charge of the paint job.  I seriously wonder how they do this on the house selling shows in just a couple of days because this took me nearly two week working a couple of hours each night and two full Saturdays.  I just put the primer coat on the cabinet bases in the main part of the kitchen.  Paint begins tomorrow, and I couldn't be happier to see the end of this.

Here's the view of our dining room from the living room.  All the paint, and we've had to take a lot out of the kitchen to keep it from getting covered in paint and dust.  That's the last cabinet door drying on the saw horses to the left.

When the new countertops came in, we had to move the microwave.  Since we started painting almost immediately after, it's been living on the floor ever since.  Those planks on the floor are trim I'm going to use to make an awkward part of our breakfast nook look like a built-in piece of furniture (that's the plan, but who knows about the execution). 

Here's the half-painted breakfast nook.  It's actually pretty far along at this point.  What you're missing here is that off to the left, we've got a bookcase just sort of hanging out in the middle of the rest of the kitchen surrounded by all of our different paint cans.

There it is!  And there's Hyde supervising and starring in the photoshoot.  He's such a multi-tasker.  Again, this picture doesn't tell the whole story.  You can't see the large pile of donation items waiting to be taken down for storage in the basement until we can fit in a trip to Goodwill.  Those two paint swatches on the wall behind the bookcase are tests for the main part of the kitchen.  We picked the one on the right.  It's At Sea by Benjamin Moore.  The stripes in the arch were the tests for the breakfast nook color.

Speaking of At Sea, here is it on the arch wall in the breakfast nook.  The edging isn't done here, so you can still see some of the old orange peeking through.  I finished the edging in this room before dinner today.  These two colors are a perfect match for our backsplash tiles, and I'm not sure that the picture does justice to how pretty the combination is.

Here's the other wall of the breakfast nook.  These are the first completed cabinets, and I'm really pleased with how they turned out.  It was such a relief to get the doors back on so that I could put a few things away.  This is an odd little space.  We have upper cabinets and a counter, but no lower cabinets.  That's because under the counter and on the other side of the wall is the stairway to the basement.  There's beadboard under the plastic drop cloth, and I plan to paint that and the currently orange wall under the cabinets the same cream and trim them so they match the cabinet doors.  I hope that this ends up looking like an armoire rather than a hasty craft project.

 

Living with open cabinets has been an experience.  It's forced me to be more organized because you can't hide anything.  This picture was taken last week, so there have been some big changes.  Now the cabinets are completely empty, and they've all been primed.  I'm getting those doors back up on Wednesday, even if it kills me.

And one last progress shot.  The new dishwasher.  We've been replacing our appliances one at a time over the past couple of years, and the dishwasher was the last thing to go.  This one is so quiet, we have to stand next to it to figure out if it's running.  And sometimes, I have to actually touch it.  It's a little scary.  But it's so pretty. 

There's one last big push over the next couple of days.  We have to stop no matter where we are in things on Wednesday because the in-laws are coming up for Easter, and we'll need a couple of days to clean.  I don't expect to get everything done by then by a long shot, but if I can get the cabinets done and the breakfast nook close to finished, I'll be very well pleased.  Oh, and very sad.  Because of the kitchen scramble, there's been no sewing at all.  But I have the Monday after Easter off work, so I plan to be stitching like a madwoman.