HFM

Kitchen fun times have begun! I started Saturday with a quick trip to the hardware store for drywall repair supplies. I didn't have to get any sheets of drywall to make patches out of, though -- someone put these 4'x3' scraps of drywall out on the sidewalk. These are perfect for the holes we will need to patch. Job number one: mice have been having a party on the top of the cabinets, so first thing first, spray down the top of the cabinets with a bleach-water disinfectant mixture: AJ held up a stage coach right after doing this. Next step: take down the cabinets! I should have taken a closer picture -- you might be able to see it here, but none of the corners or joints had been finished, so that was repair job number one. And here's where the mice have been coming in: Sneaky bastards! Here's my first ever drywall repair: I also found that the back corner ceiling was starting to sag -- there's nothing to attach the drywall to in that corner, so I guess the guys j...

Last week, we busied ourselves with some final tasks and errands needing to be done before starting the kitchen. Ikea cabinets were assembled: This one received the Pickles Seal Of Approval. I spent a @#$@$ hour removing this #@$(* chimney from the back of the #@$*#@ stove so that we can get the #@$@@ thing into the @#$)@*#$@ house: Pickles helped in her usual way, from the garden bed: And we began moving stuff out of the kitchen cabinets: After all that, I put up these curtains we had gotten at Ikea while getting the kitchen stuff: The guy at Ikea forgot to sell us the drain assemblies that go with the new sink, and, of course, the sink requires a hard-to-find size, so Susie very kindly (& bravely) ventured with me to Ikea on Saturday. For the uninitiated, Saturdays in there are like the running of the bulls in Pamplona. We started our adventure by fortifying ourselves with Swedish meatballs at the Ikea cafe (cafe? cafeteria? kafe?): And, of course, they had exactly one drain asse...

We're now only three weeks out from starting the kitchen, so we spent some time this week working on getting the remaining must-haves for the project: sink, furniture for the sink, faucet, vent hood, and floor tiles. AJ's dream sink is a vintage double-bowl farmhouse sink, like the one her grandmother had. And my dream is to find an interesting old cabinet that we refinish and cut a hole in to fit the sink into. Our original idea was to spend some time going around to recycled building materials places, flea markets, etc. to see if we could fulfill our dreams, but 1) those sinks are in demand so will be hard to find and likely expensive if we did find one, and 2) the prospect of spending weekends driving around shopping rather than sitting in the backyard in the sun was unappealing. So this week, we cut to the chase and went to Ikea. We got this sink and faucet combo: The sink cost less than half what I've seen farmhouse reproductions going for elsewhere, so our budget is h...