Rapture

This made me chuckle.

Disclaimer: I've never actually seen an episode of Jersey Shore. But unfortunately, I do know who Snooki is, and I know enough to realize that this is funny. Ha!

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Kitchen Reno: Prepping and Priming

We're one month into our kitchen renovation.

On the one hand, I can't believe how far we've come in just a few short weeks. On the other hand, I look at how far we still have to go, and can't believe we're already a month into it. I originally had the idea that we could be completely done with everything by the end of March (so, I basically gave ourselves two months--seemed generous) but now I'm wondering if even that was a little too ambitious.

Just keep swimming. I'm trying to break this up into digestible chunks of work, because when I start thinking about it as a whole, it's too overwhelming. All we can do is take one thing at a time.

There were exciting parts of this week, and there were boring oh-my-gosh-let's-just-get-this-over-with parts.

On Thursday night, I started deglossing some of our base cabinet frames with TSP-PF. The guy at Home Depot tried to tell me that I wouldn't need to bother sanding after using this stuff, but after he raised my expectations, I was not all that impressed. It did do its part to clean the cabinets well, and I think it did help remove some of the glossy protective coat on the cabinets, but I didn't feel comfortable just priming from there. We want this paint job to be as durable as possible, so we decided to follow all the info I've been reading and sand, even though it's a giant pain in the keister.

So, Friday night was some sanding. We used the palm sander and 150 grit paper. Now THIS seemed to do a good job. It removed the finish in some parts, and in the places where it didn't, it did severely dull the surface. I went over everything with the sander twice, then did a good wipe down/clean up again to remove any dust.

Come Saturday, I was feeling pretty confident that it was well prepped for primer. So, I busted out the primer and got busy.

I've read about a zillion cabinet painting tutorials, and after talking to one of the experts at a local paint store, this was confirmed to be the best product for the job. This is Zinsser Smart Prime. They claim that it's the performance of oil-based but with the benefits of water-based primer. So far, so good. I like working with it.

The bases were a bit tedious with the door and drawer openings. I eventually figured out that the best method was to do the inside lip of the openings first, then go over the fronts to fix any drips. I got better and faster as I went, but it still took me about two hours to do all of our base cabinet frames. All was OK, though; I was listening to "Overboard" on TV. Can't go wrong with Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell.

"I just... ate a bug!"

ANYWAY.

It felt really good to get some primer on those cabinets. I'm more looking forward to doing the doors since we plan to spray those, but at this point, putting white paint on those dirt-colored cabinets was extremely satisfying, no matter which method I was using. And it has already made a huge difference--just wait a minute and I'll show you. :)

First I must discuss the great paint debate of 2012. For the love of all things Sherwin Williams, I have not ever had this much trouble choosing a paint color. Back when we first bought the place, we thought we were going to paint the kitchen a goldish-yellowish-creamish color. And, while it was still in the running initially, it just didn't seem to be quite right. Then we thought we'd go with a gray color, but after staring at about 25 shades of gray, that didn't seem to fit either. Then we landed on green. And, although we are sold on green at this point, and although we *think* we have our shade picked out, I think it'll still be a split second decision this week.

Although the one in the middle was the initial favorite, after staring at it for a good 24 hours or so, I was no longer convinced. The one on the left (highlighted with the red arrow) is our current leader. And no, your eyes are not deceiving you--they really aren't very different from one another. Gah.

During Nora's nap today, we were back to work. Michael continued prepping more cabinets in the basement while I tackled a completely lackluster job--repainting the ceiling. BLAH. I really was not looking forward to it at all, because come on... the ceiling is boring. However, I must say that I have gotten way better at it since we've moved in. Back in August, I painted Nora's ceiling and it nearly drove me to drink. It was awful. It was impossible to tell where I had painted, I applied everything unevenly, streaks were visible, my neck was killing me... I ended up painting the damn thing like three or four times and I swore I would never paint another ceiling again.

Of course, after we redid the drywall (including the ceiling!) in our family room this past fall, ceiling painting was upon me again--and I pulled out all of the stops. I Googled the "proper" way to paint a ceiling and watched YouTube tutorials. (Who knew that you were just supposed to paint in straight, overlapping lines? I had always been taught to do the damn "W.") I also armed myself with a secret weapon: PINK PAINT.

Have y'all seen this stuff? It's Glidden's EZ Track Ceiling Paint, and it.is.glorious. It became my best friend in the fall, when I had to paint the family room ceiling way more times than I wanted (it was a drywall/mudding problem, not a paint one). So EZ Track and I became reacquainted this afternoon. Yay.

The gist is that the paint goes on pink, but dries white. Pink so you can see what you're doing and where you've painted--white so that your ceiling looks fabulous when it's done.

See the pinkish/grayish streaking going on up there? This was after I had painted the entire ceiling, so it was in the middle of drying. The parts closest to you were done first, so they are pretty much completely dry, while the portion furthest away from you is wet. Cool, huh?

This is after it has already dried quite a bit, but you can still see the pink hue. (Don't mind the busted looking drywall right there--we ripped out and are replacing the door jamb for the laundry closet.)

For good measure, I'll be doing a second coat of paint on the ceiling tomorrow, and then I'll get to move onto the walls--COLOR!! I'm pretty excited to add color. I just hope I end up liking what we choose.

Oh, and here's what the rest of the kitchen is looking like:

Still a freaking disaster, but LOOK! The beginnings of white cabinets! Wheee!

It's amazing how adding a little primer can change the way things look so dramatically. The countertop, in my eyes, looks like a completely different countertop. Before, it seemed to be sort of pinkish somehow, but not anymore. Hooray.

The next time I update, things should be looking significantly green around here. And hopefully we'll have made some good progress on the upper cabinet frames, too. Currently, we're trying to decide if we should rehang the uppers BEFORE painting them (after priming, definitely), or after they're done. While it would be easier to paint them while they're down, I'm afraid we're going to end up damaging the paint job while getting them back up, so... you can imagine which way we're leaning. Any experience out there?

Hopefully you're not sick of my kitchen updates (and infrequency of other posts, sorry!) already? Fun times--and more progress--are ahead.

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Clean Sweep

Tonight... we cleaned.

(And no, we did not stage this. She picked up the broom on her own tonight.)

See that nasty drywall dust on the floor above? That has been coating our kitchen for the past 10 days. It is the reason we had plastic taped up over every doorway, why we couldn't cook in our kitchen, and why life has been generally miserable around these parts.

But tonight! Tonight, we (fingers crossed) finished the little bit of sanding that we had left, and afterward, we immediately got to cleaning. Vacuuming, then scrubbing every crevice of the microwave, the stove, the refrigerator, the countertops, the floor. All of it.

I already feel a million times better. Like this:

Because the chaos that consumed our lives--that weighed on me like someone was sitting on my chest--it was mostly because of the filth. I don't like the disorder of having no kitchen cabinets and letting the rest of the house go to shit, but hey--at least we were able to take down the plastic and clean up the dust.

For now, it is those little things that are making me happy. We are moving onto the next stage of this project: Paint. On the walls (if we can finally choose a color, which is proving to be tough). On the cabinets.

Yay.

Oh, and lest you think that living with a sweet, adorable little toddler is all fun and games, I feel the need to give you a small dose of reality. Nora made her way over to the stairs with the broom, dropped the broom, tried to climb the stairs, got removed from the stairs, and...

Someone doesn't like it when she doesn't get her way. A big ol' tantrum ensued.

And then this happened:

What...the...? The kid picked up my shoe and bit it before I could even react. It's not like I paused to take a picture of it while she stuck a nasty shoe in her mouth. I was already snapping away, dutifully documenting her toddler tantrum, when all of a sudden she was biting my shoe. And I got it on camera.

Is it normal for them to bite random things when they're frustrated? Because this isn't the first time, unfortunately. At this age, I feel like her tantrums are mostly caused by her inability to effectively communicate, so I wish she would just learn to talk already. But that's a whole 'nother subject.

I'm just going to go back to basking in the glory of our clean kitchen. Disassembled? Yes. But clean.

Happy Wednesday. And hey, Happy Leap Year!

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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!

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Spitting Image

Genetics are hilarious.

The night after Nora was born, I sat in my hospital bed with my sleeping newborn passed out across the front of me. She had been born at 3:29 a.m. that morning, and after a day full of family and visitors, this was one of the first quiet moments that she and I got to spend together. I took the opportunity to study her features. Her hair, little face, and hands. She had been swaddled or otherwise wrapped up in a blanket for most of the day, but I uncovered her little legs and feet to take a formal peek at them. When I got to her toes, I started cracking up. They were MICHAEL's toes. Teeny, tiny versions of his toes.

It's not that I actually doubted Nora was Michael's kid (this isn't Jerry Springer, y'all), but that was the first moment where it was like, "Yep! He's definitely her daddy!"

In those first days and weeks, people commented a lot about how Nora looked like Michael. We broke out a couple of old baby pictures to compare, and it was easily confirmed. Just check out this blog post I did when Nora was a newborn.

As she's grown, the jury has shown more of a split when it comes to the "Who does she look like?" debate. More and more people have started saying things like, "I see a lot of Heather in her," and I occasionally get the "She looks just like you!" comments as well. And I'm sure they're not lies; after all, I did carry the kid for nine months and contributed half of her genes, surely I should get some kind of resemblance, right?

I think she's a good mix of the both of us, really. I can't clearly identify features of Nora's that are MINE versus features that are HIS, because well, let's face it--Michael and I don't exactly look like night and day. We're very similar in a lot of ways: hair color, eye color, skin tone, etc.

BUT... Last weekend, Michael visited his aunt and uncle, and she brought out some old photos. I got a text from Michael with the following photo, and I had to laugh:

I was immediately struck by the similarity. That's Michael as a baby, but I won't lie--he looks ridiculously similar to Nora. Wouldn't you say?

Check out the side-by-side comparison:

What do you think? :)

P.S. We're in kitchen renovation hell right now, so please excuse my lack of regular posting. We're in the new drywall stage--it's up as of Saturday, and now we're into the mudding and sanding part, which is pretty much the worst.thing.ever. It's bringing back horrible memories from our family room project, that's for sure. The problem this time is that the kitchen is in the center of our home, so we pretty much have to walk through it to get to any other part of the downstairs--which is impossible since all of the doorways are taped off with plastic to try to keep the flying drywall dust to a minimum in other areas of the house. Ugh. Fingers crossed that things go smoothly and we'll be able to take down the plastic and have some semblance of a kitchen again by this weekend.

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