Back to it

Well, as some of you know, the job hiatus put a minor damper on our home improvement projects. Something about spending a ton of time networking and the constant nagging fear that perhaps you won't find something really put the kibosh on even thinking about home improvement. But, as it normally does, everything worked out and I've been gainfully employed for about a month now, which means it's more than high time to get back on the horse and do some home improvement.

So, we turned out eyes back to the kitchen and decided that it was time to maybe complete a project. It didn't hurt that Matt's parents kindly agreed to come out again and help us finish up. But, first things first, that old tired countertop had to go. So we went to Menards and bought the Rust-o-leum kit we've had our eye on (which miraculously had gone down in price) and got started.

The box advertised that you could complete the project in a weekend, so we started friday night with prepping. With Matt's parents around to help, we felt it was time to not only redo the counter and (finally) put up the backsplash but also replace the sink and faucet.

The sink is a cast iron Kphler and the picture doesn't do it justice, it's pretty, I promise. But before any of this could get into the counter, the old stuff had to come out. So we set about taking out the old sink and faucet:

It actually didn't take too long to get the old stuff out, but once we did, we noticed a slight problem. The hole for the old since was about half an inch too big each way for the new sink. However, since it was getting late, we tabled that issue for the evening and proceeded with step 1 of the kit, which is scratch the living daylight out of the old counter to remove the gloss in to allow the base coat to stick.

It's a little hard to see the scratches in the second photo, but I assure you, they are there. After that, we talked quite a bit about the sink and how to fix it and came up with, frankly, some pretty dumb ideas. Which we actually tried out, but more about that in the next post.