After a few weeks of Rich working from home, we decided that we needed to do some moving around of stuff in the house. The exercise equipment needed to be taken out of the office, and we made the decision to dismantle Alex's room since it's downstairs and that would become the new exercise room. His stuff got packed up, and the room was painted and the treadmill was put into that room (which was a feat of it's own! It won't come out of that room until we move away, and maybe not even then! lol!
The office got a coat of paint as well and two of the bathrooms. Now the entire house (except for closets) has been painted since we had moved in 3 years before.
But then the biggest house project was thought of, and debated and decided on. We had always said that we would like to redo the kitchen in this house, and decided to tackle the project. We found cabinets online we liked and worked with a company to decide on our cabinet layout, and we ordered them. We decided on our appliances and ordered them. The cabinets came and we assembled them in the garage to wait till we were ready to tear out the old kitchen and put in the new one.
I packed up the kitchen and it all went upstairs to the bonus room to sit for a while.
On July 30th I left for San Antonio in the afternoon to go and help Ashley move from one apartment into another apartment the next day.
By 10:30 the next morning Rich sent this picture out to the family:
He spent the rest of the day tearing out the tile, and the next day we all worked to bag the tile up and stack it on the side of the house to slowly add to the trash can for the next few months. lol.
The old cabinets sat in our dining room for a few weeks until Habitat for Humanity's Resale shop could come and pick them up.
Our temporary Kitchen was in Alex's old bedroom- which is the room behind the kitchen.
Alyssa's birthday was definitely one to remember with the entire kitchen torn out and a huge mess! No homemade birthday cake this year!
Rich spent a couple days figuring out the wiring plan for the new appliance layout and adding a few plugs where I wanted them for convenience. We had a plumber come in and cap the old gas line that had gone to the island for the cooktop, and run a new gas line down the wall for where we wanted the cooktop to be in the new design.
Then he patched the drywall.
First day of school waffles! I got creative with a lot of our cooking during the next few months while the kitchen was in different stages of disaster. We learned that the plug back in Alex's room where we had the kitchen set up, was on the same breaker as the one running the fridge, so if we ran the microwave, and tried to plug in another appliance, we would flip the breaker.
Double bags in the crockpot- cooking rice and chicken at the same time!
A nice coat of paint and you can't even tell we had so many holes in the wall to do the wiring (and from tearing out the old backsplash)
The mastic on the floor from the previous tile was thick and tough to get off. We decided to leave it to the professionals, and had to wait a little while for them to get us on their schedule.
With the house plastic'd off as much as we could we were ready for the pro's.
With that gone, we could start working on the cabinets.
Our floors are not even, and our walls are not all perfectly square... we had to patch a part of the concrete floor that was open with just gravel after they took the mastic off. We had to pull out math skilz to figure out levels and filler strips and all that fun stuff as we navigated installing the cabinets. It took many trips to the hardware store for specific screws, and shims and wood for modification of some cabinets and supports.. but eventually we got them all installed.
We repainted baseboards... put crown molding and handles on.
Then we waited for the pro's to step in and do their thing with countertops, tile and hardwood floors...
But... the kitchen still wasn't done!
The dishwasher, ovens, cooktop, and microwave were backordered. We had ordered them on july 1st. It was now September and we still didn't have a firm delivery date. First it was the end of September, then mid october, the end of october, then mid november... We installed the old appliances back into spots where the new ones would go so we had a working patchworked kitchen until the new appliances came. We also installed new lights over the island and the kitchen table during this time.
Finally, the week before thanksgiving we were told they would come the week after thanksgiving... surprisingly the week of thanksgiving we got a call and they were here in Houston, and we could get them delivered wed. The day before thanksgiving! We said absolutely! They brought it and before they pulled the double ovens off of the truck they told me there was a little bit of damage on the back of the double oven and asked if I wanted to refuse delivery of it... I looked and saw it was a small dimple in the sheet metal, and said I don't care, I'll still take it!
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