Big night

Last night, we got a lot done.

I put up all the cabinet doors in the kitchen. So bright and white! Can't wait to get rid of that backsplash though:

 

Don't have the before picture with me right now, but i'll def put one up later. 

Matt and Mark also spent a ton of time upstairs and, TA DA! we now have power and a ceiling fan. On a switch! Its pretty awesome :)

Great job guys and thanks so much to Mark for the help. (PS. I took a picture specifically of the mess they made getting it up. I'll put up another one later to show what it looks like all clean and shiny, but I think this one really illustrates how much work the guys did to get this going :) )

yes...we...are...still...painting

And I have the white splotches on my to prove it. Or had, until I showered. In any case, we are sooooo close to done painting the kitchen (ok, not really since when we put up all the doors we will need to repaint the walls, but sometimes delusion is the best way to keep going). Last night I spent a couple hours putting the first coat of paint on the kitchen cabinet doors. I don't have a before because, well, primer is white and the doors are white, but I do have this super stunning visual for you:

Yep, there they are, in all their snow white glory. They still need another coat, but we are getting close.

AND, in other news, our knob and handle samples all came in and we decided to go with oval knobs for the cabinet doors, pulls for the drawers, and handles for the cupboard doors (the yellow ones). James kindly arranged them thusly:

We are going with the bigger of the two knob sizes, but the one-eyed smiley just wasn't as charming. I've already ordered them and hopefully they should be arriving pronto so we can actually open our doors once we get them up.

Ad Hoc Entertainment

A while back, when we were living on Milton St., Matthew and I bought a cabient at the Dig and Save to store our linens in because we had so few closets. When we moved last year, it was relegated to the basement, but with the new house, its found a new place as our entertainment center! We (read Matt and James) had to cut a hole in the back for the xbox to vent, but I think it is a vast improvement over our before:

And the lovely after:

 

Now all our cords and games and DVDs have a home!

so many things

Well, its been a busy weekend. Matt cut the grass and fixed a gaping hole in the soffet:

  

on Saturday while I was off on my B&B birthday gift. 

Then on Sunday I finished painting the cupboard doors (finally) and hung them while Matt and James took apart his box spring and reassembled it upstairs:

I"m pretty happy with the decision to paint these boards the same color as the wall, I think it would have been super distracting to have a big white patch on that wall. Plus, check out the before shot, we've really done a lot since then!

And, as the icing on the cake, we also reclaimed the porch. We had been using it to paint on since it had been so hot, but its not that hot anymore and it seemed like a good time to move the unpainted cabinet doors back out to the garage so we could actually enjoy the lovely weather we've been having:

 

The lone "beer man" chair by the fridge was, of course, Matt's idea. 

reinforcing the walls

So we've been adding outlets in the upstairs bedroom, and needless to say, its been a bit of a challenge.  And in the process, there was a casualty. Plaster walls make for interesting holes:

And thin slats make for poor support, especially when a little too much pressure makes them crack. So tonight we did some reinforcing so that the outlet would be nice and snug.

First we cut some pieces of tempered hardwood. 

And then we put them behind the wall and clamped them in:

And then we screwed them in:

And plastered over the holes:

Don't worry, it dries white.

Oh, and Leroy helped. Of course:

cabinet hardware

So tonight we didn't really do very much. We had good intentions of doing some more of the electrical work, but we both got home pretty late, so we went on a walk instead. But, I thought I'd put up some picks of the cabinet hardware I ordered yesterday. We got a bunch of samples, cause we aren't really sure what we are going for. Without further ado, here's some picks:

The knobs:

I'm partial to the first one, since it looks like the knobs on the doors, but the whole point of getting samples is to see how they look.

For the drawers we are going to do handles or pulls (and we will probably do handles on the very large doors behind the kitchen table, since tiny knobs would look kinda silly on 4ft doors)

A couple of them shipped today, so they should be here soon. Funny how owning a house makes you excited about things like that. Just like how I love getting socks and underwear for Christmas now. Oh grown-up hood, so much silliness.

Unpacking and re-venting

The bedroom has been sorely in need of some attention. It still had a number of boxes with odds and ends in them and some unslightly plastic containers that I figured we could do without:

Also, you might notice our table was still in plastic wrap, which isn't really the look we are going for. So I unpacked and rearranged until I ended up with this:

 

Ah, much better (besides the unmade bed, but pretend you don't see that). Now the problem, of course, is that every time I organize a room, I find things in it that don't belong. So I put them in other rooms. Which might have been previously organized, but are now slightly less organized because I'm putting more stuff in them. It seems to be a never ending circle, but I'm hoping we'll get through eventually. For example, the bathroom closet, which was so nice and neat previously:

 

Now looks like this:

Ah well, I'll just have to do my best not to get dizzy.

And speaking of going back around, Matt replaced the dryer vent again this evening. He and Joe attempted it a couple nights ago (the previous version was a paper thing, very flimsy version of what we now have), but had some trouble with the connections. The second try worked like a charm though:

Thanks to Cori (and Joe the first time around) for the help!