Finally, Another Update

Well... I guess it's about time for an update. Things are still moving a bit slow, especially with all the rain, but we are making progress. Here's what we've accomplished over the last few weeks.

Got almost all of the kitchen cabinets installed. There are only two base cabinets left to be installed and that is because they will interfere with our current dining room. We will wait to install these as long as possible. Probably until the counter top is installed.

There were two tricky cabinets that we installed and are worth mentioning. The first is the refrigerator cabinet. This cabinet fully encloses our refrigerator and ties into a cabinet above it. The standard depth of the refrigerator cabinet that we received from the factory is 24". The standard depth of a refrigerator is ~30". This means that 6" of the side of the refrigerator would be exposed beyond the edge of the cabinet. We felt that this would not look as nice as if the cabinet extended the full depth of the side of the refrigerator. So, we modified the cabinet to make it extend 29 1/2" from the wall. We also had to build out a platform to attach the cabinet above the refrigerator to since it has to be moved 5 1/2" out from the wall. Basically this cabinet alone took my dad and I the majority of two days to complete, but it looks great and I think it will be a nice touch to hide the black sides of our stainless steel refrigerator.

The second tricky cabinet was the sink cabinet. We are putting our kitchen sink in the corner overlooking the backyard. The sink cabinet itself isn't really a cabinet, but a cabinet front that attaches to the two surrounding cabinets. In also has a cabinet floor that needed to be cut to fit installed so that it matches the height of the cabinet floors of the surrounding cabinets. Finally a toe-kick had to be built for the false sink cabinet so that the space underneath the cabinet was not exposed.

The other thing that we have been getting finished up is the drywall mud and tape. With each joint requiring three coats of drywall compound, this job got old pretty quickly. The ceiling corners were the hardest to mud cleanly. It took several tries to get one side of the corner smooth without messing up the other side of the corner.Fortunately these will be covered up with crown molding.

Once the mud was done it was time to sand. We used a sander with a vacuum hose attachment. This worked quite well as long as we kept the vacuum filter clean and it really helped cut down on the dust inside. The sanding was finished up in half a day and it really made a difference to see the walls so smooth. Too smooth,though. We needed to rough them up with some texturing. We borrowed a texture gun from a friend and had a go. It doesn't match our original texture perfectly, but it's close and looks good. Texture is really nice since it hides all the imperfections in the drywall.

Wanting to get our living room back to normal sooner rather than later, we moved on to painting this week. We primered the walls and ceilings, painted the ceilings white to match the existing and painted the walls around the sliding doors the same brown color as the rest of the living room. We also painted the walls that will be inside the kitchen corner sink since it isn't actually a cabinet as well as the inside of the refrigerator cabinet since it wasn't completely white due to the modifications we made. We still need to paint the walls around the kitchen windows, but we're not sure what color we are going to use for that.

That pretty much brings you all up to speed. The next few projects include getting the new electrical panel installed and hooked up, getting the outlets and switches installed in the areas that are finished, installing the kitchen lights and putting up the stucco wire to get the house ready for stucco.