We are in the kitchen

Well we are in the kitchen now and it's great to be able to cook on an actual stove and not have to run up and down stairs to eat. We still do not have a pantry but I'm working on fixing that. I need to finish the cabinet for the pantry.

The cabinet is going pretty well I was going to do one piece, but at 89" tall, 20" deep, and 33" wide it is a bit to large to fit in the pantry assembled and assembling it in the pantry will probably compromise it's integrity, so i chopped it in half. Now i have a 35" tall by 20" deep by 33" wide base cabinet and an upper cabinet which means that I can assemble them in the basement and just mount them to the wall when finished.

The deer have been in the Hostas which is a pain. I just need to remember to use liquid fence, it seems to keep them away, but only last a week or so.

I have some pictures of the garden and the cabinet which i will post later.



I will post pictures soon

Grout Finished

I finished grouting the counter top and back splash last night. It was a lot more work than I had anticipated. Over all the Epoxy grout was not difficult to work with, but the float is heavier than a standard grout float so by the end of Monday my hands just hurt, but the counter top was done.

The back splash was more of a pain because there was not as much room to work the grout in with the float. I ended up just using my fingers to press the grout in then I finished up with the float to clean the excess of the tile. That worked pretty well and I was able to finish up the back splash last night.

Freezing the grout does lengthen it's cure time so I used a bucket of ice water while i worked to give myself more time to grout and wash. I even froze the leftovers from Mondays work and used them on Tuesday and while the grout was a little thicker it applied nearly the same. Visually there is no difference between the epoxy grout that i froze over night and the batch that I made fresh which is very handy as the pot life the the grout is only around an hour at 70 degrees F room temperature.

Pictures to come.

The best layed plans

Last year as we were trying to balance both the office and the bedroom project we made a promise to each other that from now on we would work on one room at a time finish that room and move onto the next. As my dad and I tore out the bathroom ceiling Friday I thought of this and laughed. Sometimes it seems the house has other plans for us.

Friday we got the drop ceiling down, the plaster ceiling down, and the plaster off of the wall containing the plumbing runs to the upstairs and then hauled 268 lbs of plaster to the dump. We also got the bathroom and kitchen cleaned up hoping that a clean work area will make Chris and I more productive in the future.

Today, with the ceiling down it was time to start on the electrical. Poor Chris has been on a call for work ongoing since Friday so I've been pretty much been a one woman show. I've never done any electrical before, ideally it would have been nice to start on a nice easy room like a bedroom but what would be the fun in that :)

Prior to embarking on my own wiring project I was a bit hard on poor Chris. I'm dirty, exhausted, and about 100 bucks poorer and all I have to show for it is a larger hole in the wall and a solitary run of romex from the basement to that hole. Tomorrow I'm hoping to pick up the pace a bit and wire up the new fan plus the vanity and ceiling lights. Much to my dismay I will be putting the old fixtures back up I was hoping to find reasonably priced replacement fixtures but alas everything was too expensive or too ugly.

Hopefully tomorrow night I'll have a fully wired up bathroom.