Where are the before and after photos?

So, I'd say the remodel is 98% done. What's left?

We need our kitchen table, which won't arrive until September 24th.

And, we need that pesky missing backsplash, which is supposedly coming any day now.

And then, and only then, you'll get the before and after pictures.

In the meantime, here's a picture of me and Moo, who incidentally, is now a happy camper. I think she hated having people romp through her house making messes more than we did.

My arms and legs look tan. Possibly because Moorea is so white.

Carpet angels

We got our carpet. The moment I’d been dreading. And it turned out to be not so dreadful. So I did what any sane person does – carpet angels.

That's an outlet by my hand, if you wondered. It's now covered by
a couch, but may one day allow a lamp to be plugged in.

Moorea wasn’t so sure about the carpet – nor was she sure about the couches getting moved back in. No carpet angels for her. And frankly, she’s probably plotting where to pee (or vomit) first.

We're going to get a new front door (stained to match the cabinets).
We're also looking forward to not parking on our lawn anymore.

In other exciting news, we finally found a kitchen table and chairs. It’s a miracle! But, as with most miracle (I’m not sure about the miracle thing), there’s a catch: the chairs will be ready Thursday. The table – not until September 20^th. But at this point, we don’t really care. We can sit at the chairs and pretend.

So what’s left?

·         The bedrooms will get new carpet on Wednesday

·         Move furniture around, clean, clean and some more cleaning

·         The remaining five (or so) sheets of backsplash will come in about two weeks

·         That’s it!!!

We are going to make our first dinner in our new kitchen tonight. Sometimes it felt like this day would never get here. And Jason requested that we have spicy chicken pasta, which, for the loyal followers, you’ll note was the last meal we made in the old kitchen, some 60 days ago.

Our final tally on our poor eating habits:

Dinners eaten at home since remodel began: 11

Dinners eaten out since remodel began: 45

The punch list

Somehow, someway, we've made it to the "punch list" stage. This is where my type A personality comes out in full force and I get to put a piece of blue tape on anything that I want fixed. We bought four rolls of tape. (Just kidding. No I'm not.)

Today, the electrician is finishing up - hanging our new kitchen light over our non-existant kitchen table. He's also hanging 1 of 3 pendant lights, since the other two haven't shown up yet (even though we ordered them at the same time). Well, to be fair to Amazon.com, we did get two boxes, but one of them was empty.

Then on Saturday and Wednesday (breaking it up into two days for my sanity) carpet comes. And after that, we are DONE!!

(Except for the missing backsplash, which you know, 2-ish weeks left waiting on that).

Blog posts will probably start to become few and far between. There will definitely be a before and after post. And then a first dinner cooked in the new kitchen post. And that's probably it. Don't be too sad.

Dinners eaten at home since remodel began: 11

Dinners eaten out since remodel began: 42

A little short

I guess we didn’t order enough backsplash. The good news is that it will only take 3 weeks to get here. That’s good news because they could have discontinued making it. We’re choosing to be glass half-full people today.



Whoops.

Oh, and we ate at home last night.

Dinners eaten at home since remodel began: 11

Dinners eaten out since remodel began: 39

And the hits just keep coming

So, all of the granite is in. I wish I had taken a picture of the installers. When I got home Friday afternoon, I was greeted with a lot of “dude! No way!” and “this is some gnarly granite”. Or something like that. I hightailed it to the bedroom and hid until they left.

The granite is beautiful. And is going to be a bitch to keep clean. I just know it. I hope I learn to love tolerate fingerprints.

I left a box on the counter for no good reason other than
 I am amazing at staging photographs. Also, the floor is covered with paper.
Do not be alarmed and think we chose brown paper for our floor.



Our backsplash. It's growing on me. Also, another box!



We also got our cabinet door hardware and that’s where things took another turn for the worse. First, after I put the fear of god into our contractor about making sure all holes drilled were straight, he still drilled two of them wrong. And he had to order new drawers to replace those two. Sigh. But if that’s all it was going to be, I can deal – he was making it right at no cost to us, so all’s well that ends well, right?

Wrong. On Saturday, Jason decided to put the pulls in and what did we discover? That they are all off about 1/16^th of an inch. Which doesn’t sound like a lot, but just take a look at what it looks like:

Yes, the cabinets still need to be adjusted, but i assure you,
that won't change how bad the pulls are.

So, where to from here? Hard to say. Our contractor was camping for a long weekend, so we’ll talk to him about it tomorrow. Jason seems to think that he can cheat the holes a little bit to fix this. But I don’t want wobbly handles if the holes are too big. And boy do I hope we don’t have to get new doors.

Also – in my most dreaded news: carpet comes Thursday. Yes, dreaded. Because we have to move everything out of our house. And it’s going to be 90 degrees. Anyone want to come and help?! Don’t all fight over the opportunity!

(Oh yeah, and since this blog is supposed to have a food component: I ate McDonalds twice this weekend, and had dinner at the movie theater. All healthy choices).

Dinners eaten at home since remodel began: 10

Dinners eaten out since remodel began: 39

Our first setback

We reached our first setback. Which isn’t bad considering we are 6+ weeks into the process.

You may remember in my last post which was oh so long ago (I have a little bird that sits across from me and chirps at me about updating the blog), I indicated that Thursday was going to be a big day.

Was. Going. To. Be.

The granite installers messed up the template, so we don’t have granite in half the kitchen. And we can’t install the backsplash until we install the granite. And the correctly cut granite isn’t showing up until maybe Tuesday. It’s hard to pin these guys down. I live and die by schedules at my job. They do not have the same sense of urgency.

We did get the granite for the island and the desk and I believe the island slab weighed 800 pounds! It took four dudes to move it in. I love it. It’s so shiny and perfect. I just wish the rest of it had been done right.

Dinners eaten at home since remodel began: 10

Dinners eaten out since remodel began: 35

The end is near?

This week is going to be a productive one; not only is all of the floor tile in place (it does need to be grouted still, but minor detail), but the countertops and backsplash are going to be installed. I have been most excited for the backsplash, so Thursday can’t get here soon enough. We also finally ordered our pendant lights for above the bar – after carefully reviewing about 3,247 options. However, we still need a kitchen table, chairs and a light for above the table. If you see anything that is pub height, dark mahogany, let me know. For the light, I have no idea what we are looking for. Let me know about that, too.

Another quality (aka blurry) picture. Do not be worried - the floor needs to be mopped.
And Jason is futzing with something.

  

In other news, can you believe it’s been 42 days since this started? And in that time, we’ve only eaten at home 10 nights. That’s honestly a little better than I thought we’d do, but our waistlines are definitely reflective of our choices.

Luckily for us, the Moran’s took pity on us and invited us over for dinner last night. I told Corey he could make whatever he wanted, but then he texted me the menu and in my head I was like “blech. Guess I’ll go hungry tonight” but I responded with “see you at 7!”. The reality was the I LOVED all of the food. We will definitely be making this in our new kitchen, in hopefully less than three weeks!



Two appearances in one blog post for Jason!



  

Dinners eaten at home since remodel began: 10

Dinners eaten out since remodel began: 32