Manje!: How 'bout a little kitchen "catch-up?"

Our kitchen project has been plagued by stops and starts (mostly stops) throughout its nearly three-year history. It has been incredibly frustrating, but we've been at the mercy of our the schedule of our very overworked contractor. He has since taken a job in another town, so we see him only a couple of weekends a month. Faced with having this drag out for another two or three years, we decided to do as much of the work ourselves as we possibly can. It's challenging because we barely have enough time to get the basics taken care of each day, but we've been able to do bits and pieces here and there. We've also had a lot of help from a family friend who we've hired to help us with all sorts of things, and lots of help from my sweet dad.

To save time and money, we started painting the cabinets ourselves. Our contractor sent the first batch out to a professional painter, but they came back so crappy-looking that we had to sand them down and redo them all. Using a sprayer and good oil-based paint, we were able to do a far better job. We've helped lay tile, grout, install cabinets, strip floors, stain woodwork, and paint walls and ceilings. Little by little, it's getting done.

We've had a couple of catastrophes along the way, including the loss of the marble slab that was supposed to go on the wall behind our cooktop. The adhesive didn't hold, and it crashed to the ground into a gazillion pieces, damaging our floor tiles and cooktop cabinet in the process. I never even got to see it installed. :o( The other catastrophe wasn't quite so catastrophic, I suppose, but it was supremely annoying. Hubby and I spent DAYS and around $500 stripping the finish off our wood floors with a piece of crapola rental machine that pulled to the right so badly we could barely control it, but even after 20 or so passes over our wood floors, some finish remained. We tried using hand sanders to tackle all of those spots (burning out one of our contractor's sanders in the process), but when we thought we were done and put on the stain, the floors looked horrible. There were lots of areas that looked blotchy and cloudy, and we knew putting the polyurethane over the top would only accentuate the problem. In desperation, we called a professional floor refinisher (which we had no budget for) and had him come and fix it. His machine took the finish off in one pass. I think I cried.

This weekend our contractor should be here for 3 or 4 days, and I believe he's bringing more cabinets for us to paint. I think we'll be finishing up the soapstone installation for the cabinets that are already in, trimming out doorways, and putting in our under-cabinet heating, but those are just guesses. Next week I'm hoping to get our dining room painted so we can move our table in and get it stained. It's still unfinished and is currently residing on our front porch. Sigh...

Anyway, here are some pictures of our progress over the last 3 or 4 months.