Day 4: Red, White and BLUE

Happy 4th of July!

This happens to be one of my favorite holidays. It's like the essence of summer all thrown together in one day: picnics, bbqs, races, the beach, the lake, sun, sun, sun, and of course there has to be a flag cake. And fireworks. And some barefoot running in the grass and cartwheeling the night away. Oh wait, I'm not ten anymore? shoot ...

The above photo is from a couple of years ago when we were down in Lake City for the 4th and even visited an Eagle Center (how patriotic of us). Things look (and sound, smell and taste?) a little different this year:

Evan and Mark are busy in the kitchen today - and they're not baking a flag cake! I'm hoping to go pick up something patriotic at the store, E bought some sparklers we'll have fun with tonight, and we might venture over to some fireworks later on ... although with Evan's 3:15am wake-up call these days, that probably isn't the smartest idea. So we're not exactly doing our traditional 4th activities, but at least E has on a blue shirt, and house projects are always our idea of a fun time. Although to be perfectly honest, I'm not too involved in this process, besides helping pick stuff out, researching, picking up supplies, and other small tasks. But someone has to keep up the ol' blog, right? Actually, I've been working a lot and will even be working on a few stories today (for my current magazine job) once I get this guy posted.

But let's talk about day 4 of our kitchen project - Tuesday. Yesterday, while I was holed away in the office working:

Evan and Mark were holed away in the kitchen:

Tuesday consisted of ripping out more drywall (since the cabinets left the walls too messy to salvage) so we tacked up a plastic sheet to help keep the dust from creeping into every nook and cranny of our house. It's kind of spooky - there must be a draft through that doorway, because every now and then it gets puffed up with air and looks like the ghosts have decided to pay us a visit.

Let's peek behind the curtain, shall we?

This is what it looked like yesterday (that's the right wall, right when you enter the room)

And here it is today, on Day 5:

 

Straight ahead there, that's where the window will go! The picture on the right shows the supports that have been temporarily added so that we can cut through the wall without the ceiling falling in. Kind of important.

Finished ripping out the top layer of laminate flooring.

Evan called a little meeting and showed me the electrical plans ... I don't expect you to follow this drawing, but it's fun to see their scribbles all over random pieces of wood and even the walls.

We'll be back, hopefully tomorrow, with updates from the rest of today. Mark is going to get the plumbing and electrical done, and E and I are hitting up Ikea to give them a piece of our mind. In a nutshell, here is what happened: we researched, planned and budgeted for this project and decided to go with Ikea because a) cabinets look good and b) they're affordable. We went in last week and bought the first two cabinets; since we have to assemble them anyway we didn't want to buy them all at once. No one said a thing to us that we might want to purchase them all before the end of June because their prices are about to change. So when we went back on Monday we learned that each cabinet is now $40-60 more, which equates to $400 more total, at least. Needless to say, we're not happy with the big blue and yellow box and are going to go stomp all over their swedish meatballs.

Until next time.

C & E

Read up on our kitchen renovation project: day 0, day 1, day 2, day 3

In case you were wondering, the BLUE in the title is emphasized since it also describes our feelings about our Ikea experience.