Dog House Final Photos

A little under two years ago we packed up our house, watched everything get loaded into a moving truck on a cold and rainy night and loaded the pups into the car to start the twenty hour drive to Alabama. It's a giant leap to go from talking about a countertop installation that happened almost 4 years ago to talking about the finished product, but I want to bring the project full circle and share the final pics of the house that we love so much.

Without any further delay, here are the last pics taken of the Dog House (with some official before pics for comparison)!...

Entry Before

After

Living Room Before

After

Living Room Before

After

Living Room Before

After

Entry Hall Before

After

Dining/Kitchen Before

After

Former Closet/Current Half Bath Before

After

Former Kitchen/Current Dining Before

After

Bedroom 1 Before

After

Bedroom 1 Before

After

Bedroom 2 Before

After (Wall between bedrooms removed, photo from a different angle)

Bedroom 2 Before

After

Full Bathroom Before

After (Didn't have the after looking in the same direction)

Before (Couldn't find any good pics before deck construction started!)

After

Even after working on the house for four years there was a big final push at the end to get everything finished and put the house on the market.  Hopefully the new owners enjoy living there as much as we did. We miss Boston and the Dog House, but are enjoying all of the new adventures down South! 
Closing out and signing off...later everyone!

Countertop Installation

The big day finally arrived!  Our shiny new countertops are officially installed.  The day actually arrived almost one month ago now, but because we ran off and got hitched I'm just now getting around to sharing!  P was nice enough to let me fly off to Birmingham for prewedding preparations while he stuck around supervising the install.

 It seemed like a pretty easy process.  At least from my point of view.  :)  We were lucky and the stone arrived with no mistakes and no cracking occurred on the install.  I was a little worried after hearing so many horror stories about slabs showing up with huge rounded corners when the clients specifically asked for the tightest radius possible.  And slabs breaking during the install causing clients to start the whole slab selection process over.  Considering it took us about 9 months to get the installation done after selecting the slab I think starting over would have been especially painful.

 The final product!  I love them.  P still puts a napkin under anything he sets down on the counter because he "doesn't want anything dripping on it and messing it up".  So it will be fun to see how it goes once we really start using them.

Both the plumbers and the electrician are in the house this week getting everything hooked up.  I think the promise of pumpkin bread made P want to get everything up and running as quickly as possible as soon as we got back to Boston.  I'm probably even more excited than he is!  And.  A dishwasher.  I can't even tell you how excited I am about that.  More pictures to come!



Kitchen Progress?

Hi there!  I think there may be one or two people out there holding onto hope that I might actually share some sort of progress one day.  It's been a great winter/spring/summer with a lot of traveling and, well, not a whole lot of house work.  But I'd like to share some pictures of the very very slow progress we've made on our kitchen.  Living without a kitchen has proven to be way too easy for us so we just kind of let it drag out for forever and ever.  But the counter templates have finally been made, which means a full kitchen is hopefully not to far in the distant future.

Lets back up a bit.  Early this year when there was (gulp) still snow on the ground we took a trip up to Cumar Marble and Stone to pick out our counter slab.  After much debate and a trip over to the home of one of P's gracious bosses we decided on Carrera Marble.  There were a couple of reasons we pulled the trigger on the natural stone versus choosing a solid surface material.  1.  we love the way it looks.  and we just don't think the solid surface look alikes compare.  2.  P's boss showed us their marble counters that were installed 9 years ago and never sealed and then abused.  And they looked great.  Not all gross and stained like you hear happens to marble.  Just patinaed and nice and worn.  We liked.  3.  We learned that should we wish to keep the shiny new appearance of our marble that there is now a super duper sealer on the market that promises to protect from any and all stains.  I think it's called bulletproof.  So we went for it.

Cumar is known for having a really nice selection of Carrera marble.  The whites are really pretty white (not greyed out as they can be) with really nice grey veining.
So we pulled a slab we liked.  And there it has been sitting.  For months.
Meanwhile we've P has been working away on the built in elements that surround our IKEA cabinetry (which we are loving btw). 

P first built a small 2x4 wall on the backside of the island and then added a small shelf as a side "leg" for recipie books etc.  And of course I went all crazy and decided it would be a super idea to get our cute little IKEA stools out and set them up next to the unfinished island.  Genius.

P was able to get all or most of the cuts for the cabinet side panels made at Home Depot so that they could fit in the Jetta.

And here they are all put in place.  We chose to add a second smaller "leg" on the right side of the island to support the marble (so we wouldn't need a massive steel bracket) and to give it a more balanced look.  The panels have since been primed and will be painted white to match the cabinet fronts soon. 

Here they are templating.  It was kind of interesting to see the way they do this.  They essentially create a grid using luan and screw it all together and then carry it out to the truck.  Done!  As you can kind of see in this pic we will also have an outlet under the counter overhang on the fat "leg"/backside of the small shelf.  There is also a second plug on the side of the island next to the fridge.  And check out the red CB2 pendants!  We actually bought them way early in the renovation.  Impulse buy.  Not loving them now, but they will definitely work for the time being!
Hoping to be back with many more updates soon!

Pups.

Some ridiculous photos of the boys to brighten up this Monday.

Porky looking super uncomfortable

And again

And Busy enjoying himself

You.  Are.  Welcome.  Happy Monday!

Kitchen Progress 1

I thought it was about time to share some progress on our very slow kitchen installation that has been happening over the last few (several) months.  We decided to go with IKEA Akurum cabinets Applad white doors.  Overall, I'm happy that we went with IKEA.  The cabinets have been very easy to put together and install and we only had one ordering/delivery SNAFU with IKEA that did end up taking a while to sort out.  If we had not taken so many "timeouts" to reconfigure the layout of the tall cabinets and refrigerator along the side wall and to discuss permanent versus temporary countertops the whole kitchen would probably be done by now.  :)

Day 1 of assembling the lower cabinets....and what looks like some football action in the background.

The first cabinets were attached to the wall and we started to position the island cabinets. Please excuse the mess, once we put the feet on the cabinets we junked them up with kitchen stuff.

This picture is taken standing between the island and the sink area…looking towards what will be a full height built in with a wall oven (see the heavy duty wiring for the oven?).

The corner cabinet was left out of our initial order so we skipped ahead and put together the tall cabinets.

Then we waited until we could get the missing corner cabinet sorted out.  (We eventually pushed the cabinets against the wall so they were not in the way while we waited)

After two additional trips to IKEA this is the current state of things.  The first trip was for the cabinet missing from our first order.  The second was to buy two additional cabinets that “sit” on top of the corner cabinet and will house the microwave and other appliances.  This allowed for the tall storage cabinets to extend all the way into the corner while also giving us additional closed storage.  The cabinet you can see at the very bottom of the picture will hang above the fridge.

We are heading to our first actual meeting with a counter top supplier and fabricator this weekend.  Wish us luck!

Breaking the Silence.

Let's not even talk about how long it has been. I have tons of stuff to share (If anyone still reads this), but for today I am going to break the silence with something that is dying to live in my house.

So if anyone wants to donate this to a worthy cause (napping) or let me know where I can find one for 20 dollars let me know. Normally it can be found here. Oh, and look at that, it's on sale. Haha.

Bandwagon: Chalkboard Paint

Did you know that new refrigerator's that are counter depth and not ugly are expensive? Well, I am here to tell you, they are. Our house came with a fridge and while it is not the most beautiful thing, it keeps stuff cold (knock on wood). So it's sticking around. But after living through the gut renovation of the house it wasn't looking so hot. It actually stayed in the downstairs, uncovered and unplugged during the whole renovation (while we were out of the house) and we would keep things that we didn't want to disappear in the freezer...geniuses we are. Anyway, so I decided a couple of weeks ago to try and spruce this beauty up. And of course, what better way to jazz up a fridge than with chalkboard paint...or so the design blogs told me.
Here it is in all its glory.

First I removed the handles. I decided they didn't need to stay because you can open the fridge by grabbing the door, and they were ugly.

Then I lightly sanded the whole thing with 80 grit sand paper to rough things up and put on one coat of primer. I just used the primer that was recommended on the chalkboard paint can for metals and plastics, but I read other places that some people used metallic primer or none at all...but I don't care about magnets. Oh and at this point we moved it out of the tiny cramped addition into the future kitchen space so that the final coats didn't get banged up when we squeezed it out of there.

After one coat of chalkboard paint.

And after two! I'm debating doing a third coat. I don't know why. It looks fine, and the can didn't specify, but maybe I read on some other blog that three coats was recommended?

That's it! I opted not to paint the parts behind the doors (see the white strip below?) because that would have involved opening the doors to paint and then leaving them open to dry...and, well, we have food in our fridge. A very small amount of food. But still, I didn't feel like moving it to a cooler, which was my only idea and sounded kind of sketchy. But it's not so bad. Kind of looks like the fridge has a pinstripe. Ohhhhh, fancyyy.

Now we just have to "season" it after a couple days and then write away. Or after I put a third coat on. Whatever.