10.10.10 @10

Must. post. today. As much as I'd rather go watch my movie, I feel I must participate in the October 10th, 2010 phenomenon.

We've owned this fixer-upper for one full year as of September 24th. And the kitchen is still in the unfinished state. I can't feel too bad, really, considering all the simultaneous projects we've been immersed in and the fact that we have three little munchkins running around, but it's still a little embarrassing. Anyway, I got tired of not being able to put things away, or find anything, or, well, of just plain not having cabinets and a range hood, so- if you want something done, you've got to do it yourself!

The first day, I reorganized the food storage. I took the rolling shelves back OUT of Evie's closet and took them BACK to the garage and put the canned food on it, stacking all the food storage boxes in Evie's closet on the floor. Much better use of space, I don't know why I didn't do it that way before. I was SOOOO tired of digging through this pile of food for months and months everytime I needed to make a meal (and usually not finding it because I didn't know what items I was missing for grocery trips)!



I seriously teared up a little as I was organizing cans by genre on these shelves. I'm getting a little choked up even now, looking at this thing of beauty.


Ahhhhh.... a walkway! And floor space!


This is how our garage looked, this time, last year:


I will not quickly forget the frustration of climbing on boxes and digging through every box a million times anytime I couldn't find something!


Look- there's our kitchen flooring and Ikea kitchen in boxes and the door to our refrigerator!


Here is my little baby taskmaster, keeping Daddy in line. "Scrub that pot faster!"


The next item was the cabinets over the office desk. On Monday, I set about figuring out how to install the upper cabinets. The hole is for a new outlet for the microwave. The idea to get the microwave up off the countertop was recent one, so we didn't have the outlet for it.


I felt a little like this woman that day


because Doug came home to find a clean house, Thanksgiving dinner on the table and upper cabinets:

You know, which really is the norm around here- I try to make sure dinner is hot and ready when my man gets home and that I have my best heels on and a bow in my hair... right before I gently remove his shoes and settle him in a chair with his favorite magazine. ...oh, the sarcasm...



The hang-up all these months was the uncertainty of being able to install the range hood myself. For one thing, it is pretty darn heavy (and awkward), and for another, it required a very precise install of the venting pipe and the positioning of the range hood itself for it to all work together. And lets face it, I barely scraped by in Geometry.



Yes, that electrical wire is holding the pipe up until the construction adhesive sets... This is not Safety 101.




Tuesday, this is how Doug found things when he got home. No dinner, place is a mess, project not done, kids clamoring for attention, wife standing on the kitchen counter. That's more like it.


But later that night when he got home from his meeting, things were all back to normal again.


One cute little pajama guy who has just learned how to blow up his own balloons.


On Wednesday, I installed the final two upper cabinets and realized I didn't have enough hinges, so I made a last-minute trip to Ikea with the kidlets to pick some up. Being that close to finishing, I couldn't bear to have no cupboard doors- even for a little while! They got installed at 11pm that night. I am a woman on a mission!


Now all we need is some trim, crown moulding, backsplash, and baseboards and it'll be a done deal! Oh, and the cabinet lighting. I'm pretty darn happy to have a fully-functional kitchen back! Especially when one remembers how long we were operating like this: