Holy Kitchen Batman!

Finally. Progress. Actually, we have steadily been progressing the whole time, but now we have something to show for it. Yesterday was a big day. Cabinets went up. Floors went in. I think we pulled a 15-hour day.

First we put up cabinets.

Adios hipster coffee station.

Steph's trimming the dowels to fit the shelves.

Now that all of the shelves are up, almost all of the old pine is gone. Recall the sauna kitchen:

(I realize that I haven't posted many "before" shots of the kitchen. If you are dying to know what it looked like before, give me one week and I will have an extensive before-and-after montage dedicated to this)

I do appreciate natural wood, but Steph doesn't live in a shack on the side of a river. I think it's important to know when to paint wood. This is one of those cases.

So we painted the ceiling and all of the wainscotting white.

We also chose light flooring to keep the kitchen as bright as possible. The flooring is pretty amazing. You just click it in. It doesn't require any nails or glue. Easy! But being novice floor installers, it still took us about 6 hours.

Steph is a pro. She was the lead on this part of the project. I just cut the end pieces and ran around looking for a tape measure most of the time. That was especially funny since we had 2 tape measures on site, and they are extremely large, but not bright so hard to see (I prefer bright tape measures. My favourite small and bright tape measure was sadly packed away and shipped to Calgary last week, among other things that I needed...but these are setbacks that make the whole project more interesting...?).

Steph is amazingly brave and truly committed to the task. Here she is liberating an outlet from the floor...with metal cutters. Eek! Were we supposed to turn the breaker off? Just kidding.

We did run into a small issue concerning the levelness of the floor. Most of the subflooring was in really good shape, except for the part in the new "addition", which is a little uneven. For some reason I have refused to take ownership of that part of the kitchen (I think because it was an afterthought and I didn't want to overcommit - I'm not exactly giving myself ample time here). So I consistently refer to that part of the kitchen as "your project" to Steph. Anyway, before we started the floor, Steph was worried that it would be uneven. To tell you the truth, I didn't really care at that point (sorry Steph!) and figured throwing some 1/2" floor boards would be fine. Not so. 1/2" is a thin stock, and floors need to withstand a lot of weight (obviously).

So when we started to notice the moving floor boards, we decided to shim them. Here's a tip: shim as you go. Don't try to lift the whole floor up and shove newspaper and foam in as far as you can reach. It actually matters where the shims go and how thick they are. Needless to say, the floor started to get worse and we couldn't tell what was causing the main disturbance underneath. So Steph came up with a clever diagnostic strategy:

She took a picture with a flash. Foam was the culprit! How very medical of her. Don't doctors use cameras to see into tight human spaces? I don't know what they are called. I don't know anything about science.

In the end the floors turned out great. We had to remove a couple of rows, which really sucked at 11pm after working for 14 hours, but it was worth it.

Now on to the island!