saga of the kitchen Part One

i hadn't planned to write this in parts, but i'm tired and need to take a break. although i hate to keep you hanging with the rest of the story, if i just save this as a draft, i might never finish it. i need the accountability of it hanging out there unfinished. so if you hate "to be continued"s as much as i do, you might want to wait until i finish part 2.

i've hesitated to post my new kitchen for several reasons:

1. i don't feel like it's totally "done".

2. we (and by we i don't really mean us. my nephew did most of the work.) did this project in august. it is now december. the time for project bragging has expired.

3. i haven't been very happy with the pictures i've been able to capture of the "after" and the before picture doesn't really do justice to the awfulness of the kitchen. the battery on the camera was dead on demolition day and the project was so crazy, i didn't get ANY pictures of the progress.

4. i'm not a brief story teller. and this project was epic for me. i knew this would be a reeeeally long post.

but i promised "housey" things and i feel like i can't get back to ranting about motherhood until i produce a house post ; )

this is what our kitchen looked like before.

(i don't even know why i took this picture. it is from january.)

it was functional, but i really hated it. it was claustrophobic and honestly, i looked pretty rough/totally embarrassing. if you look closely you can see how all the angles on the counter top have a darker line going to the back. that was caulk. this tiny kitchen's counter top consisted of seven! pieces of counter top pieced together. the corners were obnoxious ledges that really ate up space. our house has some "quirks" to it, but this kitchen was beyond quirky. it was just ugly.

when we first moved into the house, the kitchen walls were a dark wine/burgundy color. combined with the oak cabinets and floors, the kitchen was a dark, depressing place to be. a couple of years ago, totally fed up with the dark walls, i painted over them with white primer. and then i left it that way. the kitchen was so hopeless-i knew there was no color of paint for the walls that could magically pull of the almondy blandness together into something i liked.

this last spring we got a new dishwasher and fridge thanks to the government and their energy efficient rebate program, so we replaced the almond appliances with black. but it wasn't very exciting to get new appliances because the room was still a yucky cave.

then august came. we discovered some mold under the kitchen sink and ended up taking out all the bottom cabinets and moving all the appliances out to make sure we got the problem totally cleaned out.

the timeline of events was insane! the problem was discovered on thursday. ( i don't even like to say the "m" word. it makes me shudder.) we ignored it until tuesday when tim had the day off because we didn't really know how to deal with it. when tim went to clean it up, we realized there was more than we thought. i don't remember why my nephew stopped by, maybe we called him, and within a couple of hours he had started to rip the kitchen apart.

my nephew, my dear first nephew who was born when i was in the second grade, is totally amazing. he's worked different kinds of construction for a couple of years now and helped with tons of family projects since he was old enough to slam a hammer. he's certainly not an average teenager. fortunately for us, the construction company that he had worked for over the summer ran out of work for him the week we discovered the problem. THANK YOU JESUS!!!

that's where the timeline got crazy. we had a week and a half to rip out, clean up, and put everything back together before he left for college. i think it goes without saying, but i'll say it anyways-i was a smidgen stressed.