Let's move to kitchen, shall we?

There has been much debate about the kitchen. You see, the kitchen cabinets are not to our tastes, but they are in very good shape and we've been struggling with the idea of altering them as opposed to replacing them. Obviously, it's far cheaper to work with what god gave us, but like everything else in the house, the cabinets were a mix of actual wood doors and laminate covered cabinet boxes. So kids, as fans of wood surfaces, that means that we CAN sand and stain the doors, but the cabinet boxes can't be stained.

So we've batted around a lot of ideas, including painting them, covered them in stainless steel, or just good-old-fashioned-buy-or-make-new cabinets. I found this super thin real walnut adhesive veneer, so I suggested I just try it out and see. The veneer is real wood, sandable and stainable. I figured if we can get a nice surface on the boxes, we'll refinish the doors and voila! New modern kitchen.

Per Kenny's suggestion, I started in the corner (with a giant spider I discovered part way into my work. I won the war, but not before he scared me into jamming my head into the underside of the countertop. Owie. You can see the veneer next to the sanded old cabinet.


My goal was just to see how the veneer looked on the island, so here it is fully veneered. It was painstaking, but looking good.


Not only can you see my work up close, you will notice that I was eating wheat chex and blue tortilla chips for energy :(


Here is the veneer wrapped around the side of the cabinet box. It was time consuming, but the veneer works really well on corners and edges.


After getting a dark stain. I'm going to give it a coat of wax to seal it and shine it up, but I was really really happy with the result. You can really see the difference in how it will look (foreground) when everything gets done and the yellowish pickeled stuff goes bye-bye.


Here it is up close!

Who's not so much an excellent wife?

Immediatelyafter Kenny did the plywood and ate something, even though it was late on a Saturday night, he went right to working on the bathroom. By the way, how rad is the green dog ceramic dish? It belonged to my Grandma.


Kenny seemed VERY busy, so I got to work on my own improvement project, which involved testing how wine and Trader Joe's rice krispie treats looked on the inside of ma belly!


First of all, I love love Trader Joe's, but those RK treats were nasty.

Without marshmellow-y goodness to distract me, I decided to go mess with Kenny. It sounded like this: "What's the oil for?whatareyoudoing?whenareyougonnabedone?what'sthatthingfor?"

Look at his godlike power to ignore me.

who's an excellent hubby?

Kenny is, and here's why.

We've got family coming in town soon, and so we can't just work on the spare bedroom/office at our leisure, it kinda needs to get done. So Kenny took up the carpet, demo'ed the 18 layers of linoleum and cement and masonite and then WALKED to the store and carted 3 huge sheets of plywood home and then took the cart BACK and then came back to get the floor ready for the hardwood.

Oh yeah, it was raining (I'm serious!)

So one loooooooong day later, here is the room ready for floors! Kenny's a hard worker!


For the record, I helped. I pulled out nails from the floor before he put the plywood down. Although I think he gave me that job to keep me busy and so I wouldn't have time to talk about my feelings.
Even more cheerleading for Meester Ken? He started work--and he hadn't even had time to unpack from his business trip. Look see proof:

Shredding...

This is this thing we have that shreds.

Check out this guy...he ALSO shreds, but in a different sort of shredding way.


When the guy that shreds moves the thing that shreds out into the hall so that he might tear up old floors and knock out walls, he plugs in some shredtastic music to keep him company. Remember how I paint in silence, to help me be slow, methodical, and to hear the paint drips? Mr. Kenny likes angry thrashy music up supah LOUD.


Senor Radley wanted to check it out.


"What the *blarg* is this crap on the stereo? Also, it smells nothing like bacon."

We all know that Kenny likes to do stuff on da house. But we NOW KNOW that what Kenny mostly likes is knocking down walls. Sadly, he hasn't had much of a chance, until this weekend. Kenny set about to see what was inside THIS wall:


Yaaay hammering walls! We found dry-wall over the strips from an old plaster wall, over the studs. Kenny got very excited about something called "full dimensional lumber." I believe that he started to explain why that was important, and good, but I saw something shiny and wandered off.


Look! It's the guts of our house! Kenny's got some exciting ideas for the wall, which will involve more demo and lots of light and more posts to come!

Broken down broked stuff

Sometimes things break. Sometimes the entire house crumbles apart in your hands. This is currently how we are rolling. The house is acting like it has Avian Bone Syndrome. Even the most delicate of touches gives the house an owie.

Case in point. I was dusting the fan. Not repairing the fan, not removing the fan. Not hanging on the blade. Just dusting. The fan blade just gave up the ghost. No pulling or twisting, it just dissolved. Maybe it was mad because we removed all of the other ceiling fans in the house?


Although I don't have a picture, the soap dish in my tub also fell off the wall. In its defense, I had been putting my foot up on it to shave my legs, and my husband informs me that soap dishes are for soap, not for entire girls. Anyway, after some cleaning, it was quickly and beautifully fixed.


If you are thinking that screen door handles generally have, er, handles, you are right. But this metal handle broke off, whilst the door was being opened. It's super fun to try and open a handle-less handle while carrying food and beverages. It used to help me open the door. Now it just taunts me. Please to replace?


Then Boo Radley's mouth hinges got stuck open. Oh noes Boo Radley!

That's right my little cupcakes, I garden!