The solution.....

At the end of last week we came to a solution with the cabinet company. We are going to order an 18 inch cabinet for the wall cabinet to the right side of the window. Currently in the pictures it is a 24 inch cabinet, we will just use the 24 inch cabinet in the Laundry Room so that it is not a waste. And then we ordered a 6 inch spacer for the bottom. This way we don't have to get the counter top cut, and it will allow both of the upper cabinets to be far enough off of the edge of the window that we can put some moulding up around it and make it looked more finished.

Now it is just waiting for the items to come in; they put the order in on Tuesdays (so today) and then it can take up to 2 weeks for it come in. Cabinet Lady Nancy did say she would try to put a rush on it. So maybe by Mid March we will have a usable kitchen, hallelujah!!

Our Kitchen is on pause.....

So we got our corner bottom cabinet installed and then wanted to space everything out to make sure we had it all right so that the countertop would fit properly. Below is our attempt at spacing out the bottom cabinets, except one is missing in the picture on the bottom right side.

We then got our countertop out and put it up as it should go. Before I explain the reason we are on pause, I must say I really like how the paint color, cabinets and countertop all coordinate, you can't tell totally what it looks like from the picture.

So when we put the countertop on we looked to the left side and the counter top was hanging off by about 5 inches, this is where the stove should fit in, the countertop and cabinet should be flush. So we looked around trying to see if we were doing something wrong. We hadn't added in a 3 inch spacer that they had given us, but if we did that it means we needed to move the upper cabinet about 6 1/2 inches off the window on the left side when the right side only has about 1 1/2 inches of room between the window and cabinet, that would look really dumb. The reason the upper cabinet matters is because the micro should be directly above the stove so whereever the bottom cabinet sits the upper wall cabinet needs to be at the same place. We started measuring and looking at the schematic the kitchen designer had done and those 2 measurements don't match either.

So currently this is our reason for pausing (see below). We called the kitchen design company on Monday and they are running back through some of our measurements. We basically just want it cut to match how our bottom cabinets are currently set-up, but we are complying with their request in hopes that they will see that they screwed up and will come out on site to fix it, wishful thinking I know. The reason I don't think they will come out is we didn't pay for delivery or installation, we picked the cabinets up and have been installing them ourselves, so even if they will make it right I'm thinking we might have to get it back to them for it to be fixed. A nearly 12 ft piece of countertop isn't so easy to transport! Oh and since the guy that did the initial design was let go not long after we ordered our cabinets that kind of makes everything a little more complicated too, so hopefully "Cabinet Lady Nancy" will be a honest and integrity laden employee and help us out to get out countertop the way we need it.
In the meantime we have started painting the "brown room" which will one day be our office and Adam started working on finishing the linen closet in the bathroom.

Hopefully this gets resolved soon and we can finally have an operating kitchen. Oh the joys of remodeling :)

As I promised......

We did have progress and a few cabinets are up on the wall, of course we are hitting a few snags along the way. What would a home improvement project be without a few snags that make you want to pull your hair out. Adam did have some helpers with this project, his brother Chris and our friend Steve. You can see Steve's face resting against the side of the cabinet in the left of the picture.

Our mains issue is that we need to reroute some wiring which isn't fun but shouldn't be too bad of a fix. The stopper currently is that the microwave wire is coming out of the drywall on the opposite side of where it needs to be and too low to get the outlet box into the cabinet that will be above the microwave. Hopefully that won't be too awful to fix. The other issue is that the outlet box that houses our exhaust fan switch and a GFCI outlet will currently be cut in half by the top of our oven range. We need to move that to the other side of the stud. Adam isn't too happy about that move but it is a much cheaper fix than the $1600 it would cost for a specialty stove that is only 42 inches high. I'm excited that there is something up but I realize with the couple of fixes we have it won't go as fast as we had hoped.

The Perfect Storm.......but darn messy

I don't know if it was really the perfect storm, we would have preferred to not have one at all, but for the destruction it caused we were so lucky with the small amount of damage that it caused our house and vehicle. Also I think we are going to save all the brush and rent a brush chipper to make our own mulch. This should save us some $$$$ in the spring when we need to mulch a ton of stuff.

This picture is of the portion of the tree that fell on my car. At this point Adam had moved my car out of the way, but you can also see how close it got to the house. Also it is harder to tell in this picture but there is obviously some trees that fell on our garage. These types of trees in this tree line were the only ones that actually made contact with the house.

The large tree branch to the right in this picture is the one that missed the corner of our house by about a foot or so.
The 2/3rds of a tree you see laying on the ground is the tree that could have done some major damage had it fallen towards the house. Its hard to tell by this picture but it was a large part of a large tree. In the background of the second picture you can see that we only really have 2 of the pine trees remaining of the like 6 that we had between our house and the neigbors.
To the right of this picture is the 1/3rd of the maple tree that is left, we are hoping if we do some trimming we are able to save the tree because it was a very pretty tree, especially in the fall. You can also see a closer view of the trees on the house on the left side of the picture. The tree that is actually lying on the ground is the one that took down our power, cable, and phone lines. All but the cable has been fixed.
The picture below must have been one that Adam took while walking around the neighborhood but it is an example of how strong these winds where, they just knocked down these mature trees like they were nothing. There were several on 44th street that were down like this and the root system and trunk size that got pulled out of the ground was probably the size of a small car.

This is another picture Adam took while walking around, this tree was lying across the street at the end our our block and was one of may of the reasons we didn't get power back for over 24 hours.

Starting to finish the Kitchen

This weekend we actually did get some interior house stuff completed, even though a lot of our time last week was picking up after the storm. We got the entire kitchen, including ceilings primed and ready for painting.

Again just for memories sake this is what the kitchen looked like before, the firey orange walls and all.

I spent most of Saturday, along with my parents finishing priming the walls, priming all of the ceiling and then putting textured ceiling paint up. Can I just say putting textured paint on the ceiling has got to be the messiest painting job I have ever done. Just ask my husband what I looked like afterwords, it was ridicoulous. We had to retexture the ceilings in the kitchen since we took out the bulkhead and had new drywall that had a flat finish right against the already textured ceiling in the rest of the room. It does look better now.

While we were at it we decided to go ahead and texturize the ceiling in the full bath, as well. I'm not looking forward to the texturing I will have to do in the laundy/mudroom eventually b/c there is no natural break from the kitchen.

On Sunday I finally got to the fun part and actually got to put color on the walls. The picture below shows the kitchen with the first coat of paint. It is much greener than it looks in these pictures. The funky paint job is because we will be putting cabinets on this wall so no need to waste a bunch of paint.

Adam spent most of Saturday splitting the large wood we cut with his brother Chris. At one point I went out to ask them what they wanted for lunch and Adam's large ax came flying out of his hands and went about 15 feet behind him. Luckily Chris and I were on the other side of him. He also mentioned Chris had just done the same thing. After that experience I decided to not visit them out in the yard anymore for the sake of not getting an ax in my head. They also laid some of the cement board in the half bath and laundry room so eventually we can get the tile down back there. Unless we have any major setback you should start seeing cabinets in the kitchen this week.