Kitchen Remodel (Part 3)

Hello, hello, and welcome back!

This is part 3 of the kitchen remodel series. If you read last post you got a good idea of our vision for this space, now let's watch it come together.

Jeffery says my blog is a great way to sum up a lot of hours into a 15 minute read. He's right. The past few weeks we haven't spent much time together. As soon as he gets home from work he's in the kitchen. I keep the boys out of the way and help periodically. We only really see each other when he decides to throw in the towel and go to bed.

And now, a photo montage of the drywall going up.

We were almost done with drywall when the cabinets were delivered. I'm back to parking in the driveway for the time being.

They are stunning. We opened boxes, checked for damage, and grinned about how beautiful they are.

Jeffery brought a decorator end into the kitchen to see it inside. We were pretty excited.

Jeffery mudded and sanded and complained but we finally had walls again, and we were ready to prime and paint. We tackled that job while the boys were sleeping.

Primer on and we're really starting to see a room now. So nice to see the blue tinted ceilings in this house disappear.

Our new lighting fixture was delivered so while we waited for the walls to dry Jeffery installed it. Of course it came broken, so he got the soldering iron out and got all the LED strips working.

It's a nice bright light.

We mapped out where the cabinets were going and only painted what would be showing.

With the walls done it was time to lay tile. But first, something I forgot to mention in the previous post, in floor heating.

Jeffery said he was planning to lay DITRA to lay tile on top of anyway, so we might as well add the heating cable too. He spent the next couple days bent over and feeling about double his age at the end of it.

The DITRA is the orange sheets. Then the heating cable snaps into place along the raised hexagon shapes. You can't cut the cable so you order exactly what you need and then have to map out around other heating sources and around your cabinets while making sure to heat every tile so there's no weird cold spots.

If you decide you want to run the heat differently it just snaps back out. We thankfully only pulled up a small section at the end to figure out how best to heat the transition into the dinning room.

Now you lay the mortar and tile on top of it.

We are so happy with our tile choice. It's just beautiful, and it looks stunning next to the hardwood.

Grabbed a quick picture of the thermostat that got installed for the heated flooring.

After the tile was left to sit for 24 hours we got to work installing the new cabinetry. Since this piece was small we fit it all together on the floor before attaching it to the wall. The rest of the cabinets won't be going up with the starter for the crown molding at the top.

Doors on and we're really excited about this kitchen now.

Now for the other side. It feels so much more open in this corner now.

I'm going to skip around the cabinet install to try and keep some of the awe until the end of the post.

This is the hardware we'll be adding after countertops are installed.

Oven cabinet in and now time to install the oven.

Jeffery had to build a shelf for it to sit on first.

That oven was heavy. Really heavy.

Remember how I told you we would have to address a cabinet? Well, Shenandoah only has rangetop cabinets with doors, and we wanted drawers. Before we ordered, Jeffery did some measuring. We ordered a three drawer and Jeffery chopped off the top drawer.

Then he screwed on a top for the range top to sit on. It's the perfect height.

We installed the rest of the cabinets and their drawers and doors. Then we put the rangetop in place. Lowe's sent a company out to measure for our countertop once everything was installed. Then we grouted the floors. When Jeffery went to push the fridge back in place he noticed the back of it was really hot. He opened it up, burnt himself on the compressor, and found that the fan that's supposed to cool the compressor wasn't turning at all. So he ordered a new fan and got the fridge back in working order. We wonder if it's been like that since we got it, because now the water coming out of the fridge is colder than it was coming out in the dead of winter.

We spent a couple weeks with cabinets and no countertops or sink before the company came back with our cut pieces of quartz. They spent a couple hours here getting them installed and then Jeffery plumbed the sink. Finally everything in the kitchen is working.

We're working on the finishing touches for the next while, but now that everything's working, Jeffery's moved onto his garage (something I'm not very involved in and probably won't blog about, sorry honey.) So since it's going to probably be a few months until the decorator ends, crown, etc go up, I think I'll leave you here with the countertop install. Feast your eyes upon this.