In the past year we gutted our kitchen, updated the outdated electrical, knocked down a wall and put up a header, drywalled, installed new cabinets, new countertops, new appliances, ripped out the old floor, sanded down the wood floors and painted them, installed a tile backsplash, installed crown moulding, built out new door trim to match the original trim in the house. In the laundry room, we tore down old wallpaper, put up beadboard on the walls and ceiling, installed chair rail and crown, ran electrical and plumbing to make it a functioning laundry room, installed new washer and dryer, installed a new flooring, put up wallpaper.

I painted Penny’s bedroom three times. We breathed new life into the original rope & pulley windows.

In our bedroom we built a headboard and I made new curtains.

Matt installed a new gas fireplace.

We had the tiles in our bathroom reglazed, installed a new light fixture, and had the rotted floor joists and subfloor replaced, updated all of the plumbing, and installed a new tile floor.

Our upstairs was drywalled and carpet was installed.

And we painted. Everywhere. With lots of painting yet to do.

We have a lot of finishing touches to do on the inside of the house which will occupy us until next spring. When we’ve completed all of these projects we hope to move on to the exterior of the house – repaving our driveway, putting up a basketball hoop in the backyard, doing a ton of landscaping… a TON. Tearing down the unsightly awning above the front door and perhaps building out a new doorway. Eventually our roof will need to be replaced.

Yesterday, I will admit, I was pretty down. The HVAC guy came by to look at our broken air conditioner and told us that we need to replace the entire system including the furnace. We can do it anytime between now and next spring, but it will mean dropping another five grand. I’m not gonna lie, it’s been an expensive year. We’ve spent a lot on the renovations we’ve already done, although considerably less than if we had hired them all out. We bought a new car. We had a baby and paid for my week-long hospital stay. We’ve done some very necessary traveling. Matt has bought a lot of new tools. It all has added up.

I’ve really been hankering to take a little family vacation, just a week away to a dog-friendly beach condo where the four of us can just hang out in the sun and sand and do some playing. When we have free weekends, they are typically spent tackling one of the many remaining projects, not getting out and doing some playing. I’m itching for the latter.

But when our HVAC friend dropped the bomb yesterday, I realized that little family vacation just ain’t happening this year. And maybe not next year either with all of the remaining projects we have yet to do. Instead we’ll keep spending our weekends painting and nailing and fixing things up. And I suppose I’ll just revel in our AC, do laundry in my new laundry room, and gaze up at the crown moulding.

Yeah, we could have bought a newer house with paint already on the walls and kitchen cabinets just ready to fill. But heck if I don’t love our house like another member of our family. The more sweat we put into it, the more we love it, and the more we can’t imagine living anywhere else. It’s the only debt we’ve got, and one day we’ll pay off this daggone mortgage and go on one heck of a vacation.

I have the world’s worst memory.

But I will never, ever forget these days.

From Daily Daguerreotype

Here are some before and afters from when we first bought the house. The projects in this room included ripping out lower cabinets and countertop, moving the extra fridge to the basement, tearing down old wallpaper, putting up new wallpaper, painting cabinets, running water and electricity for the washer and dryer, installing a new floor, installing beadboard on the walls and ceiling and putting in crown molding & chair rail.

Before:

From Daily Daguerreotype

From Daily Daguerreotype

After:

From Daily Daguerreotype

From Daily Daguerreotype

I’m so pleased with how it all turned out, which is a tribute to how good Matt is at actually creating what I have in my mind. As you know, I love doing laundry, but probably because of my adorable laundry room and its convenient location right off my kitchen. We’ve started parking our cars in the backyard now, so this is becoming our main entrance and has been really functional so far. I’m also seeing via the picture that it’s time to take out the recycling.

We also tackled a project this weekend that we had been wanting to do for years. I had inherited an old beat up bookshelf that my grandfather built years and years ago. It had been sitting in my parents basement for a while holding cans of paint, so it was in pretty rough condition. This weekend we sanded it down and put a few fresh coats of black paint on it giving it new life. Then last night Matt hauled up the boxes of books we’ve had in storage for a year now, and I organized them on the bookshelf. With my new zest for reading, we’re both tickled pink that our books are finally accessible. Although we realized we need about 2 more shelves of the same size.

From Daily Daguerreotype

Matt’s currently down in the basement putting the second coat of paint on a coffee table he built years ago, which is getting a new life in our newly finished den upstairs. The den and guest room are slowly coming together, so I’ll have pictures of those perhaps later this week if Penny Cate is still snoozin at the wheel.

Feels good to be finishing up some of these things and finally moving into our house.

I am sooooo excited about this article (the second newspaper article I’ve been interviewed for… EVER!) because I really enjoy reading this health reporter’s columns as she’s very fair and balanced. And I think we could all use a bit more health reporting that is balanced. Something along the lines of OMG! SWINE FLU = THE APOCALYPSE!

Plus I love that she’s bringing attention to midwifery – a subject that sadly very few women know anything about. I know that I personally knew nothing about midwifery until I started doing my own research because it’s just not in the public eye.

At any rate, this is all falling on the week that we returned from a fun trip to the East Coast. Meaning I had no food in the house and the house was a mess. We had just finished painting the kitchen floor, so the kitchen was ripped apart. And the drywall for the upstairs gets delivered tomorrow morning with the crew right behind ready to start working. Tomorrow morning Matt has his board certification exam, which is just a tiny little bit important. Meaning if he passes he gets a nice fat raise. And the letters behind his name will now say “M.A.  B.C.B.A.”

Then we’ve got Matt’s climbing buddy coming in from Massachusetts on Saturday to go rock climbing for the weekend, and my mom arrives on Monday morning to hang out with me for a week. Which means I will frantically clean every nook and cranny of my house only to have her arrive and clean it all much better than I did the first time. And I will love and adore her for it.

And somewhere in there, I need to finish the nursery because the photographer from The Tennessean will be coming by to take a picture. Of me. At seven months pregnant and heavy enough to be a mean and competitive contestant on The Biggest Loser.

Strangely enough, all of this hectic activity is actually really good for me. I work best under tight deadlines, and frankly get a rush from anything that feels a little bit like a high school theatrical production.

But if I completely crash and forget to pick my mom up from the airport on Monday morning, can someone please tell her it was all because I opened my big fat mouth? She’ll roll her eyes and understand.

Projects like installing central air and wood floors throughout your house are a bit of a pain, but nothing is as much of a pain as knocking down a wall in your kitchen, gutting it, and putting in a new kitchen from the ground up. This I know from experience, although my parent’s budget and timeline was far different than ours. They hired an awesome contractor and over the span of several months lived in their finished basement while the kitchen was being renovated. For those many months, they referred to the room in the finished basement as “The Studio” and became well accustomed to cooking with a toaster and microwave and living out of a dorm-sized fridge.

This past weekend, we blocked off our own kitchen to finally get around to painting the wood floors. Because we didn’t want to push our luck, we decided to plan the painting with the most conservative of timelines including two full days between coats for optimal drying time. Which meant that I had 5 days worth of food to plan out in advance with a toaster oven and basement fridge as my only options.

I spent much of Friday at the grocery store and in the kitchen making up a whole host of sandwiches, cutting up cucumbers and summer squash and marinating chicken that could be grilled outside. We’re on day 4 of living without a kitchen, and I’ll be honest, the sandwiches are getting old. Same for washing our dirty dishes in the bathroom sink. And going outside and around to the back of the house to get milk from the basement fridge.

Here’s what our dining room currently looks like with a mattress blocking off the door to the kitchen and the dining room table covered with our picnic staples.

From Daily Daguerreotype

And here’s the kitchen floor drying.

From Daily Daguerreotype

After five days of living like this, I honestly cannot imagine how my parents lived for months on end in The Studio. But then again, our finished project is nothing like theirs.

From Daily Daguerreotype

I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that every time I go to my mom’s house I beg to cook a meal, and the entire time I talk to my pretend audience as if I’m a Food Network chef.

Ok, mineral oil?! Did you know that it’s a laxative? We went into both Home Depot and Ace looking for mineral oil and they looked at us like we had horns on our heads. Matt wound up picking it up at the grocery store where all the other laxatives are stored. I was extremely grossed out watching him wipe laxative all over our countertops to seal them.

Here are some before and after photos. The mineral oil turns the countertops really dark, but as it evaporates over a few days it lightens up. So currently the countertops are in between these two grays and we’ll see how much lighter they get. I don’t like the look of the really dark countertops, so I’m hoping they continue to lighten a bit.

Before:

From Daily Daguerreotype

From Daily Daguerreotype

After:

From Daily Daguerreotype

From Daily Daguerreotype

One side done, one side waiting, and our new kitchen light!

From Daily Daguerreotype

We had a plumber come on Saturday to run pipes for our new sink. He was a ripoff so we didn’t have him complete the necessary plumbing (running pipes for the dishwasher), but Matt should be able to do that. He also took a look at our gas fireplace and assessed that all it needs is one new valve which we should be able to replace ourselves. So I’m hopeful that we’ll have a fully functional fireplace for the holidays!

After Matt finished installing all of the base cabinets, he wanted to move the fridge and dishwasher into place so he could see how much space he would have to built a support structure around the dishwasher to hold up the soapstone. IKEA gave us these chintzy support panels to hold it up, but we’re skeptical, so he will build a wooden frame just to be safe. Then the countertops will go in – probably next weekend.

We also are waiting for our electrician to come and finish the electrical in the kitchen. So until then, all of the appliances have been moved back into the kitchen to get them out of the living room and dining room, so I can start cleaning the house and getting ready for us to move in!

Here’s a sneak peek at what the kitchen will look like without the countertop, backsplash, and painted floor (the three things with color!) It’s really starting to come together!

From Daily Daguerreotype

From Daily Daguerreotype

From Daily Daguerreotype

So I put on my thinking cap and came up with The Plan. The driver would take the soapstone back to the warehouse 10 minutes away, and hold it there til Wednesday when we could come by with a U-Haul truck. They could then load the soapstone onto our truck with their machine, and we would disassemble the wooden frame and cut up the soapstone right on the truck to make smaller slices that Matt and I could carry into the house. You think I’m good for nothing around here except painting yellow stripes on the walls, don’t you! WELL, THINK AGAIN!

So here is pictorial evidence of how our Wednesday went down.

At ABF to pick up the slabs

From Daily Daguerreotype

U-Haul pulls through in the clutch

From Daily Daguerreotype

The nice ABF guy loads up our pallet onto his thinger

From Daily Daguerreotype

From Daily Daguerreotype

Nearly 800 pounds of awesomeness

From Daily Daguerreotype

He posed for me on this one

From Daily Daguerreotype

She’s in!

From Daily Daguerreotype

Here are the two slabs standing upright in their wooden casing

From Daily Daguerreotype

They sent some samples so Matt could practice cutting. Very nice gesture.

From Daily Daguerreotype

At home after disassembling one half of the wooden casing. Taking that apart was actually tougher than cutting and moving the soapstone itself. I left most of this work to Matt and happily stood there holding tools for him.

From Daily Daguerreotype

Our two slabs!

From Daily Daguerreotype

From Daily Daguerreotype

Matt putting the diamond blade on the circular saw

From Daily Daguerreotype

Tape on the bottom of the saw to prevent scratching the soapstone

From Daily Daguerreotype

The last picture before my camera battery died… right before Matt made the first cut.

From Daily Daguerreotype

Matt actually only had to make one cut, because the other pieces were light enough for us to lift them. So the remainder of the cutting will happen on Countertop Installation Day, which I believe is fast-approaching! All in all, the whole process was easier than expected, since much of the weight was in the wooden pallet and casing. Once that was removed, it was easy as pie!

But I am taking today off. Ya know… to recuperate.

Last night my friend June came over to help me paint stripes in the breakfast nook. I have yet to erase all of the pencil lines, but I’m already psyched with how it turned out. It’s subtle and calms down the bright yellow that was a bit overwhelming to take in all at once. So thank you, June! And I’m sorry I cut you in half in the picture.

From Daily Daguerreotype

From Daily Daguerreotype

Also gets me motivated to take down those horrible maroon drapes in the dining room and clean up the breakfast nook window. All in due time, my friends.

Well, they were mostly right. We’re bumping into a few more errors thanks to IKEA, so we will wait a bit longer than we had hoped to finish up the cabinets. But we were very pleased with all that got accomplished this weekend. Enough jabbering, here are some photos of the work we accomplished this weekend, the guys hanging cabinets, and the girls hanging wallpaper. Also, HOW CUTE is the yellow bird wallpaper? Thanks, Caitlin, for the tip-off!

Also, a HUGE THANK YOU to my parents for all their help this weekend. Eight hands made lighter work, for sure.

Installing Cabinets:

From Daily Daguerreotype

From Daily Daguerreotype

From Daily Daguerreotype

From Daily Daguerreotype

From Daily Daguerreotype

From Daily Daguerreotype

From Daily Daguerreotype

From Daily Daguerreotype

Hanging Wallpaper:

From Daily Daguerreotype

From Daily Daguerreotype

From Daily Daguerreotype

From Daily Daguerreotype

From Daily Daguerreotype

This room off the kitchen used to house more kitchen cabinets and the refrigerator. We’re going to turn it into the laundry room. We started by laying liner paper which was a PAIN IN THE BUTT. But we were papering directly on plywood, so felt it would make a smooth surface. The next day we started papering the birds, after realizing we wouldn’t have enough to go around the whole room. So wainscoting will go 2/3 of the way up the wall, and will be painted gray with a white chair rail. I’ll also be adding wainscoting to the ceiling and painting it white. The area on the wall that we wallpapered around will have the hanging cabinets that the previous owners had up. I’m just going to paint them white. Then underneath the cabinets will be the washer and dryer. I think it will be nifty when it’s done, though it may take a while. But that’s fine, cause Matt needs time to grow to love the birdcage wallpaper!

We also got the chance to assemble our new table and chairs for the breakfast nook. We only got two chairs, because the table will slide into a corner where Matt is going to build us a built-in bench for more seating and under-seat storage.

From Daily Daguerreotype

And that pretty much gets you up to date.