Pantry Shelving

The pantry shelving has been installed and the special order door is in. The shelving was installed by the same guy that installed our cabinets. The door has an embedded 3form product with grass reeds embedded in it. More on that later.

Appliances Begin to be Installed

Electricity and gas have arrived on our island. Today the oven and the warming drawer were installed and plugged in. Although they are capable of being fully functional, we'll not use them in favor of keeping the protective plastic covering on them until after more work has been completed.

On top of the oven are the grates for the cook top sitting in their styrofoam. The cooktop and downdraft ventilation are still being installed.

Lots of items are waiting in the wings and ready for their next steps.

The Rendering

Months ago, after going through a number of design decisions, we received the above artistic rendering of how the kitchen would look in the end. Back then it was very difficult to imagine this ever coming to life. Now it's more amazing to watch how the actual kitchen is starting to resemble the rendering.

Cabinet Installation Begins

Most of the cabinets in the kitchen are up. Some detail work is still needed but the major work is done. There are three glass doors still coming for the wall cabinets and two glass doors for cookbook library on the island.

Installing perfectly square cabinets into an imperfect 50 year old house is not without its challenges. These particular cabinets don't come with the little cheater strips on the ends to mask imperfections. And the floor is not perfectly level so it took some work to make everything fit neatly.

The Formica counter top fabricator and installer was here today to measure out the exact specifications. He should be back next week to install the Formica. Appliances arrived today and are sitting in the garage.

Electrical Upgrade

As a part of all this we also decided to upgrade our original 1950's electrical system with something more modern. We took out the old outside box and replaced it with an upgraded 125 amp box.

Building code required us move it to the left a bit. Below the old box is the gas meter and new code requires that gas and electrical not be on top of each other.

We centralized the two sub panels into one sub panel in the garage and lost the old breakers which were probably more of a fire hazard than a safety feature. It's generally not a good thing to hear your electrician say, "Gosh, I haven't seen these in years."

All this has been happening over the last few weeks along with everything else. But now the texturing and paint is all that's left to do on the electrical upgrade.

Cabinets arrive

Our bamboo cabinets left Washington state on Tuesday and arrived today around noon. They were greeted by our cabinet installer who unpacked and inspected them. They will work through Tuesday of next week to install them.

Today they unpacked and unwrapped each cabinet and took away all of the packaging surrounding each cabinet. They began actual installation of the cabinets to the right of where the sink will be.

Meanwhile, downstairs in the garage, Joel patched the walls where sheet rock was cut away in order to upgrade the electrical system for the house. We upgraded our main breaker panel outside the garage wall and did a few minor electrical upgrades in the garage.

We also have finally found a product we like for the facade of our fireplace. But that's another post for later.

Color my walls

The walls and ceiling have been painted. The ceiling is white, the back wall of the kitchen is painted with Kelly Moore's "Tropical Teal," and the gray covers the other walls.

We're excited to finally be playing with bold colors after so many years in a white or off-white residence. People would tell us that it's just paint and you can always paint over it again. But we never mustered up the courage to actually do it.

Plastered

The bulk of the work this last week has been on getting the sheet rock back up, taped, filled with mud, and finally textured. None of this is particularly photogenic so we'll have to rely on text for this post. There were a number of days of working on the ceiling to make sure that seams will be invisible.

Last Thursday and Friday were the texturing days. Because the rest of the house has skip trowel texturing we wanted the walls and ceilings to match. This means it had to be done by hand rather than spraying on which is more common now and much quicker.

This coming week we will have the walls and ceiling primed and painted.

The pace is starting to pick up!