Kitchen Reno: New Walls

It has been a hell of a couple of weeks as far as our kitchen renovation goes, and I figured it is time for an update, even if it is not a very exciting one! When I last posted about it, we had ripped out all of the brick--taking a good portion of our drywall with it--and we were staring at studs. We were also waiting on an electrician to come in to run the wiring for under-cabinet lights--and fix a few other things as well--while we had the walls open.

Well, on the same day that Nora had her ear tubes surgery, the electrician did come and run all of the wiring. The next day, my brother came over again and helped us to measure, cut, and hang all of the new drywall. It took a lot longer than we anticipated, and was a pretty full day of working, so I was bad and didn't take any pics of that process. But, once we were done and we had the chance to do some mudding, things were looking like this:

After that, things got... unbelievably messy. Dear lord, I forgot how much I absolutely HATE sanding drywall mud. After one night of sanding, I declared our house uninhabitable for anything except for sleeping.

I thought living without a kitchen sink was difficult, but this was so.much.worse.

We made the decision to retreat to my mom's house after work every night, where we cooked and ate our dinners, then came home to put Nora to bed AND GET TO WORK. We worked on the kitchen every.single.night this past week, because honestly, it was hell and we just wanted to do whatever we could do to get it done as quickly as possible.

It was a crazy and exhausting week. Especially since work is ridiculously hectic right now, too. Let's just say: Stress? I have it.

We were bound and determined to get our base cabinets back into place so we could get our countertops and sink back on this weekend. Even after working every night, we were still left with a lot to do in preparation for the countertop placement, so we actually had to cancel plans with friends on Friday night in order to get the job done. :(

BUT! But, thanks to help from my mom and kicking it into high gear on Friday night, we did get it done, and my brother showed up on Saturday morning (third Saturday in a row, he's the best brother ever!) to help us get the cabinets, countertops, and plumbing back into place.

As of yesterday afternoon, the kitchen was looking like this:

That's Michael and my mom scouring the old wallpaper glue off of the walls. If you go back and look at the "before" pics, you'll see that the walls over there look white. Well, as it turns out--that was all GLUE! Scrubbing led to the discovery of nice, smooth, GREEN walls underneath. Who knew they could look that clean??

As of this moment, the kitchen looks pretty much like this except the green walls are gone, because I finished priming everything during Nora's nap this afternoon. Yippee!

Also, the boards that are leaning in around the dishwasher in the pics above have finally been attached to each other and the cabinets, building the surround around the dishwasher. That has only been six months in the making!

We still have a long road ahead, if you can't tell. Two weeks in (three weeks when you count the prep), I'll admit that I am tired of it already. I'm running out of steam, but I'm hoping to get the walls stuff officially finished within the next day or two so we can move onto something else (painting cabinets!) to get me excited about it all again.

We've had some trouble with air bubbles forming in our mud (we had the same problem in the family room), so now that the walls are primed, I actually had to go back over areas of them with spackle to fill in tiny little holes that formed from the air bubbles popping. It's a pain in the ass, and I don't know what has caused this problem for us--but it is what it is, and I expected it to happen this time since we had already been through it with the family room. I spackled the areas tonight, hope to sand them tomorrow, and then we can hopefully clean the dust off of everything once and for all so we can have a (somewhat) functional kitchen again.

We're currently trying to decide on a wall color. Sherwin Williams is having a sale later this week so we want to snatch up our paint! We are looking at shades of gray. The countertops have some gray in them that we want to pull from, and we think that it'll contrast well with the soon-to-be white cabinets, and the darker wood floors that we're hoping to get installed after this mess is over.

More to come!

P.S. In case you don't follow Heather Drive on Facebook (you totally should, click here), I wanted to share a cute video we got of Nora and Hunter dancing and singing to "The Hot Dog Song" yesterday. They love Mickey Mouse Clubhouse!