Final Touches

A few final touches in the kitchen... the magnetic chalkboard is up. We had the cabinet manufacturer make an oversized door and HandyMan painted some sheet metal with a few coats of chalkboard paint. He attached the metal on some mdf and mounted it in the frame with some construction glue. At the bottom, I attached our Etsy vinyl decal. So cute. I love the touch of black against the white cabinets.




We also got our Sony LCD TV mounted. We used an 8" arm, to give us a little swing action. Funny, but with the TV, we find we spend more time now in the kitchen...a way to kill some time while you're waiting for water to boil, or its good background noise when you're tidying and cleaning up. Go figure.




Is the kitchen done? Just waiting for the curtains to come back from the seamstress, and then yes, it is done :)

And It's Done

It took a long time coming, but the kitchen renovation is finished!! I can't tell you how excited we are to finally sit back and take a look around the room that we created. Nothing beats the feeling of entering a space, and just using it... opening the door to a well-stocked fridge, pouring yourself a glass of milk, storing the pots and pans away, rinsing the dishes... all mundane little things you don't realize you miss until you haven't done them for a very long time. And boy, did we miss this room.

To see full sized pics, click here

The Befores and The Afters...

















There are a few small details left to finish... the chalkboard to put up, the curtains to be shortened, the TV to be hung on the wall... but for now, we're content just to whip up a good meal in our new kitchen. Let's call this room done :)

Lift Off!

After waiting for plumbers to call back, waiting for plumbers to show up, and finding plumbers that weren't available for weeks on end, we - okay, HandyMan - took matters into his own hands... and removed the offending radiator!  And it was surprisingly easy.  He got some tips over the phone from a helpful plumber and drained the system and moved the rad in all of 30 minutes.  If we knew it was going to be that easy, we would have done it ourselves weeks ago.  No matter, at least its out and we saved $300-$1200 in the process (yes, those were the quotes we got!).

Appliances are being moved in tomorrow.  Just a little late (did you happen to spot the old fridge in our dining room in the Globe and Mail photo?  No?  Good :) )  After that, another two weeks for us to do the backsplash and get the valance and handles in and hopefully, I will be left with something that feels as fresh and lovely as these pics.

In The Home Stretch

I'm on pins and needles folks. Granite countertops are going in tomorrow (tomorrow!) and appliances will be in at the end of the week. That means we will have a functional kitchen soon. HandyMan worked his tail off to get the trims and baseboards finished. It was a bit of a hassle because our new drywall is thinner than what was there originally so the door frames sat out from the drywall. But HandyMan, being the perfectionist architect that he is, shimmed everything up and made sure all the awkward door trims lined up. I'll post some pictures of the trims and granite tomorrow, but in the mean time, here's some of my favourite details in the new kitchen...

The ribbed glass door fronts...


Full extension drawers with dovetail joints AND soft close. Plus, the cabinets are frameless construction so the doors cover the entire front of the cabinet box...


Pull out shelves in the pantry...


Pull out spice drawer...


And the pendant light over the sink.


And here's a sample of the drawer handles (though the ones we got are in a brushed finish). Don't you just love the rectangular cup pull? They tie the whole vintage/deco look of the kitchen together.


I'm so ready for this to be over -- take out food lost its appeal weeks ago, lol.

Goldfish - check!

Just when I thought things were getting quiet around here - what with the kitchen cabinets installed and just waiting on the final touches - a long weekend tempts HandyMan and I to get a few more things knocked off our To Do list.

We were on the hunt for transition strips and door and window casing. After less-than-fruitful trips to Home Depot and Lowe's, we headed to our new favourite lumber store Central Fairbank Lumber. More than a lumberyard, this place offers a plethora of doors, lumber, hardware, siding, columns, and mouldings mouldings mouldings. Best part was that they had free samples of all the mouldings so we took a whole pile to mix and match at home. We decided on a fairly flat casing and simple backband for the window and doors.

A little bit of clean-up in the garden unearthed a nice surprise. The previous owner Kiki had a little water feature, but after we cleared it of its rocks and dirt, we discovered it was big enough to house a fish or two! We moved a rock out of the garden to use as an island and Mama HandyMan donated some floating plants. HandyMan picked up 3 goldfish at Walmart...though we worried the racoons would make a snack out of them :o\ Turns out, one of our fish met their fate not by a racoon -- but by our water pump! Yup, sucked right in... what a horrible way to go.

After that was all done, we still had quite a bit of time left in our long weekend. Check out what we did in the next post!

Kitchen Fabric

It’s a long weekend here this weekend and HandyMan and I have some exciting stuff planned… shopping for door casing, transition strips, touching up the paint. Woohoo, I can’t contain my excitement :o\ One other fun thing we are doing is making a trip to Designer Fabrics and pick up some samples. There is a sliding door at the end of our galley kitchen and I really don’t like the racoons and other googly-eyed creatures hanging out in our backyard peeking in. So, I’ll be putting up a curtain at that end and also have a roman blind over the sink.

The fabric needs to pull in colours from the adjoining dining room, which has bold yellowy-green & brown wallpaper and white wainscoting, and the hallway which has white trim and charcoal grey walls. (Hmm, that colour scheme sounds a litle frenetic, now that I mention it). Since the kitchen cabinets and layouts are all very angular and linear, I thought we could soften that by using a floral pattern. I need to also consider the scale and complexity of the pattern...it should be smaller than the dining wallpaper and should either have more/tighter pattern or looser/less pattern than the wallpaper. Anything too similar would make the rooms 'compete' rather than 'complement'. Here’s a few contenders I’ve picked from the website:



Finding the right pattern is going to be a bit like buying a wedding gown... you never know what's going to work until you try it on.

Impatient!

I know I should wait to post pics until the kitchen is finished. I know posting now, with the kitchen in its half-done state, missing the countertop, backsplash, and accoutrements, may ruin the surprise and give an anti-climatic end to the wait of the last three months. But I. just. can't. do. it. I'm just not that kind 'o gal.

So drumroll please... here is the new kitchen :)





As you can see, there's still a lot left to do. Mike the electrical guy will finish off his work next week, HandyMan will do the plumbing for the fridge line, appliances will come in, granite will be templated, manufactured, and installed, and finally HandyMan and I will install the backsplash. We're talking another three weeks until we can actually cook a meal here. Oh - and the handles - the fabulous handles which I ordered online and had shipped to my sister in New York who was going to bring them home on her next visit that was supposed to be next weekend - yeah, sister isn't coming home so I'll have to find another mole to smuggle the hardware :o\

But the cabinets are here so that's all that counts. My white kitchen. Yay!

Before...


and After!