Kitchen work and the last half week

Whew. I don't know what else to say to describe the work that we've been doing the past several days. My mom (Hi Mom!) came down on Sunday after surviving the withering heat of Merced and seeing the First Lady give the UC Merced graduating class (439 strong) their commencement speech, and started helping us figure out a color scheme and general plan of attack for tackling the kitchen.

The weekend consisted of hours of scraping 2 coats of paint off of un-sanded and un-primed laminate cabinets (then sanded and primed), selecting some paint colors (Oatlands Subtle Taupe, Asiago, and Knight's Armor), many trips to Lowe's and Home Depot, Costco, and Von's, and just a lot of general work.

We spent a lot of prep time getting the kitchen ready for new paint; we took Monday off of work to make certain we could get it all done. To be honest the days and nights are starting to meld into each other and I'm not quite sure what happened when.

But the end result is we got a ton of work done; my mom weeded and pruned rosebushes, cleaned off cabinet door hardware and prepped the cabinet doors themselves for transformation (forthcoming) and Christina and I scraped, sanded, and painted our way into a new kitchen.

Tuesday saw the installation of the sink, disposal, and accessories and grinding down of the front entrywat by Christina's dad Nick (thanks Nick!) as well as the Verizon Fios installation (finally some fast internet), and the completion of the first coat of paint on the kitchen ceiling and walls. Take a look at some of the photos from this past weekend.




And finally, while we still have a little more work to do in the kitchen, take a look at the before and after shots:



So I want to thank my mom Catherine, Christina's dad Nick (and his workers Tito and Roberto), and of course Christina. Good night! I need to get up and have the energy to do this tomorrow.