Though it sometimes seems we’re moving at a snails pace, we’ve been priming, painting and putting up more trim on the kitchen addition. I took a day off of work to paint, paint and paint, so the outside now looks like this:

Ooooh, color!

And one side is completely trimmed and painted except for the dark red accent paint – lookee here:

We still have alot to get done before cold weather hits, including putting electrical/flooring/walls in the addition and parging the whole chimney, but we’re finding it hard to stay motivated. You’d think having a giant hole for a kitchen would spring us into action, but we’ve gotten so used to living in chaos that it doesn’t even register anymore…… funny how that happens, isn’t it?

This past weekend, a good friend and I took a trip to Toronto to visit the zoo, where we spent a good long while trying to get the animals to pay attention to us, or at least come out from behind the rocks for a split second so we could tell our friends what a Hairy Nosed Wombat looks like. It was a day well spent, and we had a few lovely encounters.

On our way back, we stopped at the Burlington Ikea. I snapped quite a few kitchen photos. Their cabinets seemed pretty sturdy for the price, and they had traditional-ish looking selections as well as the typical contemporary styles. It’s pretty mix-and-matchable, with add-ons galore.

I can’t say I totally loved them – they were obviously not custom hardwood cabinets…… but as a low-budget options I give them a thumbs up.

To see a few things I liked well enough to snap photos of, keep reading….
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I’m a web designer, so I spend a large chunk of my day fooling around in Photoshop. It’s the kind of software that I just keep finding new uses for, kinda like Backpack, a wonderful (and free) organization tool for computer geeks and listmakers.

Lately I’ve been mocking up different kitchen elevations with Photoshop. I used to draw, but after computers came into my life pencils fell by the wayside, and so did my skills. I think it’s actually a lack of patience on my part. In any case, my elevation drawings are downright pathetic and require hours of explanation. So I’m sticking to the digital stuff.

The best thing about digital mockups is that I can move things around, switch colors, and add/subtract items within seconds. It helps me make big decisions on color and placement.

Here’s a mockup I did recently with ideas for the area around our kitchen stove:

Right now we’ve got an ugly 70’s looking almond color stove, but we’ll be upgrading at some point so I used a purdy white one stolen from Home Depot’s online shop. The cabinet style is stolen from another online shop. The flooring comes from DalTile’s website, the backsplash from American Tin, and the baseboard is my own creation.

The mockup took about half an hour to create. Even though it isn’t perfect, it’s very helpful for visualizing the space – and it helps me explain my (sometimes very vague) ideas to Teague without getting a blank look.

If you don’t have access to Photoshop, the best free alternative I’ve found is the Gimp. It’s been around for a long time, and has many devoted users. And the price is definitely right.

We’re still working on the kitchen exterior, which seems to be consuming our lives. It’s painful how long this project has taken, because we’re both pretty much bored to tears at this point. I keep saying “we’re getting so close!” only to find that there are ten zillion other small details I’ve managed to forget about.

The back side of the house is now fully sided, scraped, puttied and primed. That means all 3 walls officially look like, well, walls. That’s a big step.

We got a paint match for the robin’s egg blue used on our exterior – it’s pretty close. We didn’t have any old paint to bring to the store, so we pulled a piece of wood off the house for matching. What can you expect?? It’s not perfect, but close enough to run with. We don’t plan on living with the robin’s egg blue for the rest of our lives anyway.

While I finished up the priming, Teague pulled out his new Wagner Power Painter, filled it with blue, and giddily started spraying…. only to be incredibly disappointed with the thing. It doesn’t produce a continous spray (there are weird “hiccups”), and he had to hold it about 3 inches from the clapboard and go over the same spot ten times to get good coverage. The “3 times faster than a brush” claim is terribly wrong, unless ours is just broken. I couldn’t believe how slowly it was going. He quit after about 45 minutes of fussing with it.

Teague also managed to crank an old stop valve off a radiator pipe in the interior. It was rusted to holy hell and not functioning properly. All winter, you could watch steam leak out into the crumbled remains of the old back room; it made my stomach churn as I thought of our massive heat bill. We’ve been cranking on the thing since March, so it was great to see it FINALLY come off. And in one piece!

Yesterday we scheduled an official “day of rest”, though we both cheated a little – Teague snuck out to do some trim work, and I did quite a bit of cleaning/reorganizing. But we still managed to sleep in until 10, AND do a whole lot of nothing for many hours in a row.

With each new course of clapboard we nail into the exterior of the kitchen addition, we get closer and closer to tackling the INTERIOR. If you haven’t started renovating your kitchen yet, be prepared for the giant pile of decisions to be made. It’s not like the living room, where a paint chip and a fabric swatch are all you need.
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Once again, spent nearly the entire weekend working on the house. Sure, there was plenty of blank-stare tv watching when we were too tired to lift a hammer, but by and large our free time was spent shopping for materials, talking about plans, and hammering away at on the kitchen exterior.

In life B.H. (before house), I had all sorts of hobbies. I have buckets of art and craft supplies to prove it. I dabbled in all sorts of things, including quilting, painting, and collage, and read about a book a week. Teague had hobbies too – he is an excellent portrait artist, and also great at architectural renderings. He used to cook me good food, play video games, and help his friends fix their cars. Now, we’re lucky if we have enough energy to stay awake through a video rental. The house is our mistress, and all other passions seem to have fallen by the wayside.

Housebloggers – what was YOUR hobby Before House?

Another big milestone reached – the french doors are finally in, and WOW, do they make a difference. Now the back side of the house has some character, and the kitchen has lots and lots of sunlight.

I’m still glad we chose old doors, but they did bring a few unexpected challenges. One door has been ever so slightly planed off at an angle on the bottom, so they don’t match up perfectly when closed. We decided we can live with this. They were much harder to hang than new doors because neither has perfectly straight lines (much like the house). The hinges are screwed in at different spots on each door…. odd, but workable. Overall, well worth the effort. Of course, Teague did most of the work so that’s easy for me to say.

We’ve been tinkering out back every night this week. Last night, Teague worked on the soffit while I played around in the pantry. I’ve decided it’s going to be my pet project, since any screw-ups I make won’t be on display. It needs new flooring, finished walls, lighting and of course shelving.

I used string, two nails and a line level to figure out what was going on with the existing pantry floor, since it’s very obviously not level. Turns out that at it’s high point, it’s about 1/2″ higher than the new floor we’re putting in the addition. Nothing’s every easy, is it?? Stay tuned to see the MANY lessons I’ll no doubt be learning in an attempt to finish a single tiny closet space!

We’ve got a new team mascot. He’s been cheering us on from his new home, on the tippy-top of the kitchen door frame.

He’s very good at erratic, spastic jumping tricks that make me run from the room in horror, positive he’s landed in my hair.

Ain’t he cute?

This morning, I felt very at one with nature. You wouldn’t believe the kind of sunlight you get when you take out a wall.

Yesterday, we knocked out the back wall of the kitchen. We had to knock it out before we put the french doors in so that we could lay down the floor joists. I had a great time yesterday, depite sweating like a pig. This is my favorite type of project, the kind that makes a big impact in a very short time frame. Here’s Teague, mid-demo:

We took the wall down, cleaned up the demo mess, put in most of the new floor joists and finished framing up the doors. It’s looking good. We put some plastic up over the giant hole to keep the bugs out, but didn’t think to do that until after a swarm had gathered to bask in the glow of the overhead lamp.

Here’s how we left things last night, at 10pm, when Teague’s frustration level hit the “time to quit” point:

Not bad for a day’s work!

Ok, so it isn’t exactly appropriate for a historic house, but this is the most inventive wallpaper I’ve ever seen, second only to Willy Wonka’s lickable hallway wallpaper.