Starting to look like a kitchen!

    After the walls were smooth, we could get the cabinets installed! Clearly, this is one of the most exciting steps, but it is also a slooooow one. Half a day went into just getting the cabinetry that will surround the fridge just right. The pantry was also a multi-day process. But then came the island, which magically got set in place in less than a day and then officially installed the next day. This was the moment I was sort of holding my breath over--would all the little squares of space on my graph paper add up to enough actual floor space for traversing around both sides of the island???

For the record, 45" of space on the seating side of an island works!

   We brought a barstool up from the basement, set it at a realistic location on the seating-side of the island, and Josh practiced walking behind me when I was hunched forward and when I was sitting leaning back. Great news, it was plenty of space! The next step was checking the sink side of the island. Would the dishwasher door being open allow someone to pass behind it or open the pantry door that it will back up to? We didn't want to get the dishwasher out of the box yet, so we tried using a measuring tape and it seemed good but maybe not great. This led Josh on a tailspin of "maybe we should rethink where you were planning to put plate storage" and a long explanation of why he suddenly, hypothetically, didn't like my designated spot. I bit my tongue and told him we can try my way and if we don't like it, then we can try it somewhere else. This conversation went on for what felt like an hour. Not going to lie: I was way more internally stressed about his suggestion than I wanted to be, but seeing how both sides were still just based on a gut feeling of what would work or not work, it felt like a moot point at this time. We tabled the issue. 

   If you read my earlier post about picking cabinets, you know that I really had a tough time narrowing it down. Well I am happy to say I LOVE the way the cabinet stain turned out! We still don't have the right light bulbs in (except for one) to see the correct color temperature, but whether it's natural light in the day time or the temporary lighting up at night, I LOVE them! The real lights can't be installed until we paint... which means we needed to pick paint colors. 

   I've had other blog posts from our old house about how much thought and time I put into paint selection, but now that we're eight weeks into the renovation, I wasn't willing to take my usual time with this decision. As soon as the first cabinets went in, I went by Sherwin Williams and picked up about 10 shades of white and put them on a large white posterboard so I could have a clean slate to compare them to, rather than the purplish brown of the old paint. I hung this under the one keeper lightbulb in the kitchen. Immediately a few were ruled out as being too gray, too green, too yellow, too peachy (I actually loved the peachy one, but not for a whole first floor). I brought Knox in because he really has a good eye, and he agreed with the ones I had ruled out. I ended up liking SW Creamy, and he preferred SW Downy as his first choice, so we brought Josh in. Well Josh ended up preferring the greenish whites, which was a no-go for me. But then he asked, "what about Alabaster?" Alabaster was one of the two whites we used in the last house during my big 2020 "Say No to Gray" painting campaign, and I had really liked it. The next day I went back to Sherwin Williams, grabbed the sample chip (3 minutes before the store closed--the poor employee was so relieved to see I knew exactly what I was looking for), and when I got home, I put it on the posterboard and instantly made up my mind that I could choose this color again without overthinking it. The last step was me thinking about a light blue I had seen in one of the SW palette books, I think it was "mindful" or "restful" or something like that. The color is SW Upward, and it reminds me of a very faint blue that our George Street apartment had been painted by a previous tenant/friend, a color that made the apartment feel homey instead of bland or corporate. I love blues, and have a tendency to go too bright with my color choices, but this is a case where a gray undertone keeps it from being a baby boy nursery color. I showed the chip to Josh and he instantly liked it too (perhaps subconsciously also remembering our old apartment blue) and we decided to use it in the great room, to make that room feel a little extra special and cozy. 

   So now the cabinets are in place but not all the doors are on. The countertop company came and measured the actual space and is working on the templates, which I was promised I would get to see mocked up on a photo of the granite slab before it is cut, and I believe the turnaround on the granite fabrication process is about a week. That means I potentially *could* have a functioning kitchen in a week to week and a half!!! I feel like I've been pretty patient throughout this process (praise God, I really have been content through these two months of living in the basement, and patience does not come naturally to me!), but seeing my kitchen finally LOOK like a kitchen, I'm getting itchy to have it finished! Not that I want to rush the end, because I know these last steps are all the ones you're going to be looking at and you don't want mistakes. It's just I now linger in the kitchen, looking out that new slider, and want to put my seltzer can on a counter but have to settle for putting it in the top drawer of an open-face cabinet. I cooked a big batch of meat on the grill and brought it inside, wanting to set it down on the island to cool before I put it in the fridge, but had to put it on a trivet on the floor instead. It was quite comical. 

   It's all coming together, and it will be finished when it's finished, and I will enjoy it in all it's fullness then!

   In the meantime, here's the nearly-finished pantry 😍

I swooned the first time I saw this installed.                 
When I look at it, The Cure song "Friday, I'm in Love"
plays in my head.                                                           

Smooth sailing with smooth ceilings

   The part of the renovation that we were least looking forward to (living through) was drywall. Josh has many childhood memories of his dad spackling and sanding, spackling and sanding, and the mess it made and the irritation it brought to the family. But if you're going to move walls, there will be new drywall, and new seams to be spackled, and you must accept that there will be drywall dust. 

   Drywall dust was already lightly covering the first floor, but the biggest storm of dust was sure to make the early dust feel like a joke: we decided to un-popcorn the ceilings. And not just in the kitchen, where we were going to have to patch the ceilings pretty significantly anyway, but the whole first floor. Why would we put ourselves through this potential blizzard of dust while living in the house? Because it was now or never, and having just the kitchen have smooth ceilings would make the other areas feel shabby and probably make us regret that we hadn't done it. So we went for it!

The old ceiling texture and some the first swipes 
of smoothing out the ceilings.                              

   Thankfully, we had a recommendation for a professional drywaller, Richard, who told us he could get the job done in five days with minimal dust, thanks to his vacuum sander and 50 years of experience. We thought this was a little boastful, but really liked that he had so much experience (and reminded me of my uncles) and arranged to use him. 

   Rye let us know from the early planning stages of the renovation that he is allergic to drywall dust and did not want to be here for the drywall stage. Getting the kids out of the house so they wouldn't be tracking first-floor dust to the other two levels was a great idea, and much thanks to their grandparents and my sister-in-law, we arranged for them to visit family for four nights/five days. 

   We prepared the house by stapling a tarp to block off the steps to the second floor and taping around the entrance to the basement and resolving not to use that door for the week, but instead to use the outside door to enter the basement. So this means when we got up in the morning and went downstairs to get a cup of coffee (before Richard and his helper got here at 7:30 a.m.), we had to go down the second floor stairs, through the tarp, out to the garage to get the creamer, out the front door, around the back of the house, and in the basement's back door to the coffee maker. At night, this meant carrying a high-powered flashlight with us as we went out the back, around the side yard, up the deck steps and into the kitchen where we had left a single lightbulb glowing. It felt silly and funny, and like one of those short memory bursts you think you'll never forget because it is so unusual and so ordinary at the same time. 

   The other major downside for the week was the inability to run the air conditioning. Not that Richard was restricting us from using the air conditioning, but all that dust would have gotten sucked up and spit out throughout the house, making it ten times worse. I thought I would be able to convince Josh to let us use it on the days that weren't major sanding days, but he felt pretty strongly about protecting our already-not-so-great HVAC system. So during that week of mid-90s temperatures in mid-July, we lived in a warm and humid basement by day and had all our windows and balcony door open with high-powered fans blowing some circulation in at night. It was unpleasant for sure, but not disgusting. One evening around 8:30, Josh asked me for a walk and I made a face that said, "are you crazy?!?" His response was, "you're not going to feel any hotter than you do now," which turned out to be true, because when the sun goes down and you're in the park there's a nice, cool humidity and a dusky pink sky that really is very refreshing. 

   Richard truly was amazing. He finished by 2 p.m. every day, and finished on Thursday instead of Friday. He would chat a little but also let you (COUGH *Josh*) know it was time to get to work. The day when he sanded the popcorn ceilings was not any dustier than any other day--I only noticed they had been done because I looked up! 

Smooth ceilings everywhere!

   Getting the drywall and ceilings done gave me a total boost of energy toward the project, and made me a little antsy to see the next big stages take place: priming/painting walls, cabinet installation, and eventually, countertops! Popcorn detail is less than a quarter of an inch in depth, and yet our ceilings now feel 4" taller, and all that white makes the house look so crisp. Totally worth a week of sweltering heat and more dust/mess on the floors that are going to be replaced!

The left side is what the floors looked like when Richard
was done, and then how they looked after I wiped them 
down with a wet rag so I could walk barefoot again.       

 

A month and a half of progress in the kitchen

    I can't believe a month and a half of work has already gone by! We moved our first-floor furniture to the basement and upstairs in early June and then demo began. Not wild and crazy demo with a pack of contractors in matching shirts and crow bars like they do on HGTV, but really just removing parts bit by bit as the old was in the way and needed to make room for the new. The carpet with gross stains in the dining room is STILL in place, with about a dozen new stains, but it won't come out until the popcorn ceiling above is ground down and smoothed over. 

   We've gone through two major renovations before, so we know there are work weeks with behind-the-scene things that go slowly and weeks with really visible stuff that makes the transformation feel like it's flying by. We've had a little bit of both so far, to the point that the kids are starting to ask, "Is it almost over?" The foundation for the future kitchen is completely laid, but drywall patching and repair is just starting now, so I'm guessing we're at the one-third done point. 

First floor transformation

Looking in from the great room to the main house

   Because the kitchen is now at ground zero level, my refrigerator and oven are sitting in the dining room, just waiting. We're utilizing the "bonus fridge" in the garage, and a combination of hot plate, toaster oven, Instant Pot, griddle and grill for cooking. Cooking (and choosing WHAT to cook) has been a little challenging but not bad. In the beginning I was doing grilled foil packets, like sausage and peppers, chicken caprese, even a gnocchi and corn packet with a white wine sauce that would have probably have been really good if I hadn't run out of propane in the middle of cooking it. We've had a lot of burgers. We've had some quesadillas using the indoor griddle. We tend to order pizza once a week. We're eating more salad than usual as our side though, so that's a good thing! I've learned that I can't run another appliance with the microwave or hot plate at the same time in our basement. I've learned that our new microwave is super powerful and not to use the automatic reheat button because the kids will have to wait 10 minutes for their food to cool down. I've learned to shop light at the grocery store and plan just three days out at a time because we don't have that much fridge space, and then the kids are forced to eat leftovers because it's all we have (win/win!). There are extra steps to food prep (figuratively and literally, as I have to go upstairs to the garage fridge at least dozen times a day), but it hasn't been bad. 

   Our basement also has a utility sink, which has made doing dishes a breeze (not a cool, refreshing breeze, more like a hot and humid breeze that is still better than no movement at all). The kids do their own dishes half the time (depending on whether we're there and catch them before they slip away). Knox told a friend's mom that he's getting over his "spongeaphobia." We have only used paper plates once so far, when we had family over for an impromptu dinner and got takeout pizza and the restaurant threw the plates in as a courtesy! 

   Living in the basement with all that extra furniture hasn't been that weird either. We have a large TV area with two full-size couches and a love seat and the great room's entertainment center; the kids' cubbies toy storage got moved around and greatly reduced to what they actually still play with (sort of); and the dining room table became the temporary countertop holding our daily-used appliances. The breakfast table, which was Josh's grandmother's kitchen table, sits against a wall and seats three, and we pull it away from the wall when all four of us are home want to sit together for a meal or a board game. We also have full walkout French doors with a picnic table on the patio and our glass table and chair set on the deck above. The kids usually fight us on eating outside because of the occasional (but non-confrontational) wasp that comes by, but Josh and I use these outdoor areas as much as we can.

Temporary kitchen in basement

   I would say the hardest part is getting used to all the noise. The cats are similarly pretty terrified of construction sounds (I hate the Sawzall, too, Sweetie Pie!) so we take them upstairs to the master bedroom before work begins each day. Most of their days are spent sleeping under my bed, unless the windows are open, in which case they sleep on the coffee table by the front window. The bonus for the cats though is that we are in the basement with them in the afternoons and evenings when work is done, and they love it. You know, in their cat way, where they don't really interact more with us but they look 20 percent happier even though they are just sleeping. 

   A cousin who went through a kitchen remodel a few years ago asked if I was getting decision fatigue, but since I took my time with the kitchen and dining room decisions over a period of about six months, there haven't been too many decisions to be made. And when there is something I don't care about, like where to reposition a floor vent for the HVAC, I let them know I don't care and to do what they think is best. Now that we've designated the area that is going to be the office, we've started making decisions about what the desk and cabinet space will be like, and we are making these decisions faster and perhaps with less hand-wringing, but that's kind of refreshing. 

Future office being carved out of the breakfast nook!

   The timing has felt so easy and right, that I don't feel like the project is moving too fast or too slow. God's timing has been such a gift: the out-of-stock floor we had our hearts set on came back in stock on a night I happened to be looking at Home Depot's website for something else; the floors were delivered on a day I was home and had cleaned the garage out early even though we had put the delivery date on hold; the day we wanted to put in the sliding door was sunny and breezy and the perfect day to have windows open and a gaping hole in our wall. There have been little hold-ups here and there, but I am full of praises and not complaints! Living in our temporary all-in-one basement has been easier than the packing up and moving stage, so let that be an encouragement to you if you have a renovation project you have wanted to do but were too worried about the mess and complications of living through a renovation!