Rinse and Repeat

That seemed to be the theme of this weekend’s work! It was a LOT of repetitive work but we got so much accomplished. If I’m honest with you, though, we both totally feel our age tonight!

But before I get to that, I’ll share with you the fate of the fake rock. It met an untimely death at the hands of Keith with his sawzall. It will not be missed! It will be a few weeks before we get to the new planter box which will cover and insulate it. In the meantime, it looks like we’ve got an above-ground grave in our front yard! We also made the decision to completely remove the fence and not replace it – at least for now. We only have our dumpster through tomorrow so it was time to make those kinds of decisions.

We’ve come a lllooonnnggg way since last week’s demo. During the week, our handyman was here and worked two days on insulating and putting up drywall in the kitchen. Not very exciting, but a necessary prerequisite to hanging cabinets.

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I might note that before they insulated and put the drywall in, Keith went full beast mode and ran all of the wiring for the electrical and finished up the plumbing. I swear, he can do almost anything if he puts his mind to it.

One other exciting thing happened this week, and that was the delivery of our new fridge. It is so much easier to find things in than our old one, and it will look great with the new cabinets. Additionally, Keith is super happy because it makes two kinds of ice. Traditional ice and cocktail “balls”. I’m pretty sure we paid a lot extra for that feature, but it’s a fun addition and he’s happy! 😉

Friday evening, we went to Lowes to see their countertop options. There aren’t a ton of options of places to go look around here, and the local places are overpriced. So, we were recommended to get them from a big box store. We had looked at Home Depot and neither of us were really in love with the options. Thankfully we found something we both liked at Lowes, so we have that decision made. With that decision came a deadline…to finish the cabinet hanging…by Friday. They have about a 4 week wait between measuring and installing, so we needed to get measured ASAP. Plus, we’ll be back in Atlanta during the week of Labor Day. So, Friday it is! The pressure of that deadline is a little bit daunting, but we’ll make it.

I mentioned that drywall was a prerequisite to cabinets. Unfortunately, we had a few other prerequisites that we spent the weekend working. First up was ceilings. You may remember that we put up shiplap everywhere in the house EXCEPT for the den and kitchen. We couldn’t finish putting it up until demo was done and the final walls were removed. Now that all of that was done, it was time to put up shiplap. And put up shiplap we did. Rinse … repeat … We had a delivery of 160 shiplap boards delivered to the house last Saturday and we put up every single one of them. AND WE DIDN’T HAVE ENOUGH! We are sooooo close – only about 7 shy of what we need. But thankfully we had enough to get the kitchen side of things done. We will wrap up the den later this week or next weekend after we meet our cabinet deadline.

Because we had so much fun doing the time lapse video last week, we did another one yesterday with us putting up a “row” of 3 shiplap boards which I’ll share in a minute. Each one of those “rows” took us between 30 minutes and an hour, depending on obstacles (such as light fixtures, etc.) in our way. We used two platforms and a board to hang twelve foot shiplap boards. Up and down and cut and glue and up and rinse and repeat!

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And here’s the video!

Here are a few still photos of how far we made it this weekend. You may notice a section in the back corner of the kitchen with no shiplap. All of that will be hidden by the upper cabinets. We were thinking we might just be able to finish the ceiling with the remaining boards, so we left that empty trying to conserve boards. Sadly it didn’t help us, but it will never show once the cabinets are up. Tomorrow’s fun will be to paint the kitchen part of the ceiling. In prep for that, I caulked every one of the holes (in the kitchen) that we made when putting up that shiplap. That is some good fun, let me tell you!

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While I was caulking, Keith was up in the attic putting the boxes in for our pendant lights over the island. We haven’t hung the glass part of the pendants until after painting, so you’ll have to wait until next week to see what they really look like!

The other big thing we had to finish prior to hanging cabinets was the floor. Because we removed walls and because the floor had been put in well after the old cabinets had been, we had to pull out some of the old floor and weave in new boards. Just like the ceiling not needing to go all of the way to the walls, the flooring just needed to go back far enough to where all of the cabinets will go. Since lower cabinets are 24″ deep, we went about 18″ away from the wall. It wasn’t glamorous work, but it had to be done.

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During the week, we also managed to assemble some more cabinets. Honestly, assembling them isn’t as hard as we thought. Because Keith organized everything so well in the garage, it’s as simple as looking at our matrix of cabinet components, going and grabbing them, looking at the instructions and assembling. We may make another time lapse of that for next week’s blog!

Next week’s blog should be a good one! We’ll have all of the cabinets hung and I’ll finally be able to move the rolling shelves down to the basement. If we have time, we’ll finish up the shiplap and I’m not sure what else. Crazy idea … maybe we’ll just have some fun and go hiking or do other relaxing things in the area!

Since it was national dog week, here’s a picture of Chloe napping while Keith & I were putting up shiplap. Chloe had the right idea!

Have a great week!