{Post 1,593} Remodel Complete Update

This last part will be short and sweet since I just wrote a long post and somehow deleted it. Here is the last-minute update. As in I literally just walked into the kitchen/living room and took these pictures.

The dark flooring is the new stuff. The light floor in the kitchen is what Wes is removing then replacing. Hopefully the frig will be put back in its opening in the next hour or so. The darker tan on the right side of the wall between the rooms is where Wes took off our kitchen built-in desk (it’s now in the living room temporarily) so he could replace the flooring under the desk as the original flooring was done.

I am eager to get our rooms set to rights. Actually, Wes just had me invite a family over for supper for the day after tomorrow. So that is some incentive to get this finished. Tomorrow. True story. This is the only night that family has available to come over, then they are traveling again for a long time.

{Post 1,592} More Recent Remodel Post (almost caught up)

Once the interior was finished, we hired a professional painter (who did a tremendous job on the ceiling and awful job on the walls). Here is a pic of this morph...

The upper picture shows the old green paint. The bottom picture is Dover white. It looks somewhat dark because the picture was taken as the sun was setting off the room to the right. At this point, our living room furniture had been in the kitchen for a month. Yes, it was getting old.

My husband is laying new laminate wood flooring by himself in the living room (pictured above), kitchen, hall, foyer, and hall bath. We are not rich or crazy...they are all connected. So far, he is finished with the living room except a small closet in there. Today he has finished the middle 2/3 of the kitchen. He is going to finish one small part in there and then resume AFTER Christmas. I still have not taken down fall decorations because our kitchen was so crowded that I could not get to them. Then we’ve had a flurry of activities that prevented me from making progress. We want to have a day or two to straighten up the living room and put up our Christmas tree before our family gathers here for Christmas Eve and the day before.

{Post 1,591} Remodel Review

So, every day (it seems) we had a construction disaster. I will skip over those and show you how things progressed. The decision to take out the fireplace meant we needed to put up most of a new wall, inside and out. Since we were destroying most of the wall, I asked if we could put in French doors to replace the single one to let in more natural light. Best (and worst) decision ever. They had to put in 3 different sets because they ruined the first two. We also had to build a subfloor where the hearth used to be and put up new drywall on the wall and ceiling on the inside. Here are a few work-in-progress pics. They loaded in reverse chronological order, and I do not know how to fix them.

{Post 1,590} Long Time No Post

OK. I have been duly chastised. Not only have a few people I know in person hinted that they thought I was dead since I haven’t posted since July 2018, but a b-friend wrote it in a Christmas card to me. What can I say? I have been so busy with one thing and another that I can barely remember what those things were. I have had to go back and look at pictures to see what I’ve been up to...and I am not a frequent picture taker. I’ll go backwards chronologically and break it up into several posts for your ease and entertainment.

If you’re a new reader, you need to know that I have a big immediate family. My hubby and I have eight children. Six of them are married. The last two holdouts are in committed relationships. We have 9 grandchildren, and 2 more are expecting in 2019 so far. I frequently help them out with various things, sometimes with very little notice.

Our most recent (and currently ongoing) project is something small that has morphed into a huge, seemingly never-ending project. We had a decrepit screened-in porch that was literally eroding. It was an all-wooden structure. We have known for years that it needed replacing, but we were not eager to spend the money on it. It finally got to the point where we had to do something.

Here is my living room before we started. At this point, you should be wondering, “What does the living room have to do with the screened-in porch? Hence, the morphing. When 2/3 of the porch and all of its roof had been removed, we made the spontaneous decision to take our fireplace and hearth out as well.

{Post 1,589} This is Happening

I have started the machine quilting on my daughter’s wedding quilt. About 8-9 years ago, she expressed a desire to learn how to sew. I tried to show her how to sew on a machine. She just could NOT get a seam to be straight and equidistant from the needle...but she has so many other skills. We resorted to hand piecing. Alas, that was as disastrous. So I packed up her project (a scrappy rail fence with same centers) until she had interest in it again. Well, that never happened. So I took out her hand piecing and made this for her wedding. I am quilting it with a Wonky Feather pattern from Pajama Quilter. It will finish at 81" x 97"...a twin sized quilt or a couch throw. I have made a few passes, and this is how it’s looking...

Meanwhile on the cabinet completion meter...Wes put the lower sink-side cabinet doors back up for me last night. We agreed that with this, that, and the other, I should wait until AFTER Rachel’s wedding (8/18) to do the last side of the island...it is a doozy, and will take much work. The other part (other than it will need the most prep work because of a legion of daily living) is that it consists of 8 drawers, whose contents we use daily. They would have to be boxed up or on the island for use while the parts are being painted. Rachel’s bridal shower is 7/22. I am the shower hostess at our church, so a lot of that is on me. Plus, we still have two of our grandsons (newly-4 and 7 months) 24/5. 

Fortunately, the really terrible island side is not visible when one is in the kitchen, unless they are preparing or cleaning up food. That happens to usually be me, so it doesn’t bother others much.

Enjoy something you love doing today!

{Post 1,588} Barn Quilt and More Kitchen Update

Our church has an annual family camp. On the way back this year, I spotted this beauty and snatched a picture...

Speaking of wooden quilts, I plan to make one of these flags after seeing a friend’s (she purchased hers, but how hard could this be?)...

Meanwhile in the kitchen...the cabinet painting is moving along. I took off two whole weeks from working on it for our VBS and then family camp, with a few days in between.  We made a few changes while all this was happening in our kitchen. We went from a double wall oven to a single. My husband finished out the upper oven section with a shelf and added an electrical outlet in the back for our Power Air Fryer Oven while he was at it.

Then I literally begged him to cut off the scalloped wood canopy above the sink and replace the fluorescent light with another type. It makes the kitchen look so much more modern. Here is the before.

Notice in this after picture that I also painted the little sliver of wall between the cabinets and the window white. So many changes!!

There are five doors drying in the garage right now. Once those are back up (lower under the sink cabinets), all that is left is one side of the island. That is the area that has had the most wear and tear, but they are the newest cabinets in our kitchen, so the original wood should be in the best shape. There are 8 drawers and 4 doors on that side, but I am eager to finish them. 

My daughter’s wedding is in six weeks. I must finish the island before then and do all things wedding. I happen to be the shower coordinator at my church. That means I plan and run the bridal and baby showers. It will be odd doing that for my own daughter,  but I’m planning already. It is actually in a little over two weeks. I picked up some fabrics for a pendant banner and some thick scrapbook paper for a garland of various-sized circles. On my way to the register, I saw the bouquet. Those are the exact colors of her wedding (Tiffany blue, blush pink, and white). I grabbed that since it was half off as well. Lots of ideas rolling around up in my little brain.

{Post 1,587} Kitchen Upgrade

I am doing a huge project....painting all my kitchen cabinets. We have an island as well as a built-in desk area with 6 doors’ worth of upper cabinets above it. I started with the island and lower desk cabinets so I could see if we liked the paint color I selected. It was so different from our former cream that it took a day or so for us to get used to it. Those doors/drawers also did not need any prep other than washing, so I opted for the easiest starting place.

Here is the before of the desk with the lower drawers out:

In the above picture, the upper cabinets are still the off-white color, not freshly painted...yet.

Here is the after...the grey is called Mindful Grey. The uppers are painted bright white in this picture.

I still need to clean and paint the kickplates. That will be an awfully hard job for me. At my age and health, it is hard to get down on the floor and back up!

The hardest part (for me) of this project is waiting for the paint to dry. It is advised to let it cure 3 days before putting it back up. In the meantime, many drawers and doors are emptied out and all over the counters and floor.

To add to the mayhem, there are several other things going on here....

~My 3-year-old and 6-month-old grandsons are with us 24 hours a day 5 days a week.

~Our double ovens died right after I baked the first 12-count pan of 200 cupcakes a few weeks back. We opted to buy a single oven to replace it because of cost and amount of use the double oven has had in the past couple years with 4 of us here instead of 10 (and the other two are leaving at the end of the summer...one forever and one for a semester). It has been partially installed for over a week. That means tools and mess all over the place.

~We have a friend who lives alone and is blind. He fell Tuesday when he was with 2 of my children. They took him to the hospital. He came to our house from there. He will need extensive surgery and is finding it very difficult to do the easiest of tasks for himself as you can imagine. 

I will do more updates soon.