Day 75-79- Kitchen Madness

So for some reason I had put the kitchen as last on my list to make decisions about...which I am regretting now seeing as how I have now lived here for 2 months (way behind on the blog btw) and still do not have a working kitchen sink...ANYWAY, let me try get back to mid June when my kitchen was getting updated...extended...renovated...not sure the word to use here.

At the beginning I decided I would keep the kitchen cabinets and just add onto them, thinking this was a cheaper route. I think it did save me some money and left some of the original character...but it wasn't cheap adding what essentially was custom cabinets and it pushed my timeframe out about 2 weeks. I could blame this on the contractor who didn't bother to show up the fourth day or anytime thereafter but I would have been on the ball they probably could have gotten built a month before. So here are some mid-build pictures for now and hopefully once I actually post the final pics I might just have countertops and a sink!

In the picture below the fridge will go on the left (where the stove use to be). Existing cabinets remain past the window on the right.

In the picture below the cabinet to the right is where the side door into the house use to be. I was able to add a dishwasher, move over the existing base cabinet for re-use, add a trash pull out and then wrap the cabinets around the other side. Essentially I added 2 feet in length to the kitchen but by removing the side door I doubled the size of my cabinets and countertop. (The microwave is sitting where the sink will be).
In this last picture the bulkhead above is where the wall use to be. The stove and microwave niche was added and the opening to the right leads to the new back mud hallway and back door.

And we now enter Crunch Time!!

Day 73-74- Shower with a Stranger

Soooo...you might think the title post is weird but that is essentially what happen...kinda. A new neighbor down the way stopped by on a Saturday morning. He is a tall friendly older man who loves to work on houses as his hobby and also likes to help people out whenever he can. We will just call him Godsend for now. Well I typically will not turn down help so needless to say I took him up on his offer of trying to help me get some misc. stuff done.

Now although I may at this point be semi-talented as a tile-girl the shower surround really intimidated me. And by intimidated me I mean it scared the crap out of me. I mean tiling a shower is serious...there is alot of water in a shower and if you screw it up you may just screw up alot of other things down the road as water slowly leaks into your walls...yeah. So needless to say it was something I kept putting off which essentially meant that I kept putting my plumbing off (aka toilet) from being installed because I wanted the plumber to come back and be able to do it all at once. So needless to say on this Saturday morning I had a large leering goal ahead of me and was not sure about pulling it off. And this is what led to the stranger and I sitting in the bathtub together. Now let's just say that you get to know someone pretty quickly sitting in a bathtub together! But he ended up being a very sincere guy and got me started on getting 6 rows straight and pretty across the back. The rest was up to me though!

How do you think I did?
Grouting from tub to ceiling was a bit messy and seemed to take forever but I was so excited about the little glass tiles that it kept me motivated. I left it very simple, very neutral, but it also went perfectly with the beauty of the floor. So next time you are here you will have to join me in the shower! Ha!