Mission (finally) Accomplished!

Dishwasher Installation Success!

Forgive the horrible taken-over-the-back-of-a-chair-with-my-phone-while-eating-lunch photo, I was just that excited. Hey, if you had been hand washing dishes for over 2 months with not one but TWO dishwashers in the middle of your kitchen floor you'd be excited too :)

Allow me to give you the brief recap of our dishwasher drama...

-February 16: Dishwasher & stove ordered

-March 22: Dishwasher & stove finally delivered after 3 previously scheduled-then-delayed delivery dates

-Next few days: J disconnects the old dishwasher with confidence he'll be able to hook up the new one

-After 83 trips to Lowe's, we discover that the type of valve that connects the water line to the dishwasher under our sink is not standard. It will connect to the old dishwasher pipe which will not fit the new dishwasher. The new pipe that came with our installation kit connects to the new dishwasher but doesn't fit the non-standard valve.

-Weeks pass while we ponder how to get around this. J worries about disconnecting the valve. I decide to just call a plumber.

-Two weeks later the plumber comes. He takes a quick look, says he sees what's going on with the valve, we just need a new (different) one. Plumber writes up the sales slip for standard installation + valve replacement for a grand total of $494. As I'm talking it over with J (who is at work), the plumber suddenly says he's "not supposed to do this but..." he would do the work for $290, final offer. Really? Two minutes later and the price is $200 less? How does that work exactly? Since we only paid $400 for the dishwasher itself and he seems to be less than trustworthy, we tell Mr. Plumber "thanksbutnothanks," and send him on his way.

-J goes in for yet another attempt on his own, armed with the new correct valve. A few hours later things are looking good. The dishwasher goes into it's new home, everything else gets attached appropriately, and a test wash is administered.  Success!

I have since been excitedly loading it with dirty dishes in eager anticipation of it's maiden wash cycle! Who knew one could be so thrilled over a kitchen appliance? We are still awaiting the maiden wash since not that many people live at our house, but we will finally re-assemble the kitchen when we see for sure that there aren't any leaks or issues. Meanwhile, some things are still out of place in the kitchen, and there's still an old dishwasher in the corner, but I'm not wasting time standing at the sink washing dishes, and that's what's really important in this story :D

This concludes the "Appliance" portion of The Great Kitchen Upgrade of 2012! We only started at Christmas and it's June, but who's in a hurry? ;)  So our upgrade list looks now like this...

Paint

Upgrade appliances

Paint cabinets

Lay new tile

*Over the past few months I think I would also add crown molding around the room and to finish off the tops of the cabinets, but those are less of an immediate necessity. 

Since we've had our tile for something like 2 years now, I'm guessing I'll be painting cabinets next! I think that will make such a huge difference in the whole look of our kitchen. Don't get me wrong the appliances certainly do their part for making things look much nicer, but the cabinets take up a lot more visual space. Having them painted white should really brighten and clean up the look of the entire room. Have you seen the difference it made in John & Sherry's kitchen on Young House Love? So excited!

Have you done anything fun to your house lately that you were seriously over-excited about? Do tell!

Dishwasher Disappointment

Sneak peek - there she is! :D

I did get to peek inside and admire her glory

But sadly, in the end, we're still staring at this now non-functional dishwasher :(

I guess I don't need need to say much beyond the title. The dishwasher install didn't work out. It actually started off really well and J was feeling confident that he'd be able to do it, but when it came time to disconnect some copper pipes we discovered that they were soldered together in multiple places. We certainly lack the appropriate equipment to take them apart without causing possible damage, so we decided to leave it for the pros. Ooohhhhh welllllllll. I've survived 5 years with this one, what's a few more days of staring at it? We just need to find the right person to take care of it for us. Doesn't it always happen when you're so so so excited for something that you get thisclose and it just dangles in front of your face for a while? No fun. 

Meanwhile, I'm working on creating some art for the kitchen and play room that I'm really excited to share! Check back for that an a dishwasher update in the next few days :D

Appliance Delivery!

The long-awaited and twice-postponed day of our stove and dishwasher's arrival finally came around. It was setting up to be a pretty hectic day. I was going to be here with C and my nephew who you may have read about here. J had a meeting at 1:00 and the delivery window we were given was between 2-4, a.k.a nap time. I could only imagine the delivery guys showing up at 2:00 on the dot waking C after a fraction of her nap, me managing both babies (who would naturally be hysterical) by myself while trying to calmly talk to the kind delivery persons. Luckily the stars aligned who am I kidding? God had mercy, and J's meeting ended in time for him to beat the delivery guys here, nephew ended up staying home, and C didn't stir during the entire process despite her bedroom being right above the front door which slams (and try telling delivery people not to let your door slam while they go in and out of it no less than 43 times).

It all went very well, but as with any story there is good news....

The stove looks fantastic :D

My pan sat so perfectly flat on it!

Yes, I marveled at the hot oil resting in the center of the pan. If you've ever cooked on wonky coils you can appreciate this.

Our first dinner- lemon pepper chicken was delicious!

So that was the good news. And here is the bad news...

Somehow I missed the memo that Best Buy neither installs your new dishwasher or hauls away your old one. Sad face. So we're in for a little DIY adventure with some friendly assistance from the interwebz. J is definitely not the classic sitcom husband who thinks he knows what he's doing when he doesn't. He is happy to admit that a project is beyond the scope of his toolbox. So while we're willing to give it a go ourselves, if things start going south I'm happy knowing that he won't insist that we forge ahead or "put a little duct tape" on something. If it doesn't work out we'll just reassemble things and call in a pro. But hey, if it's do-able (and from the instructions it seems to be), then we'll give it our best shot. I shall return with an update!

Say Goodbye

...to our little friends! Let's take one last look at our sadly outdated, though impressively still functional, dishwasher and stove. I'm fairly certain they were installed when the house was built back in 1999 making them a good 13 years old. Despite their outdated-ness and lack of aesthetic appeal, they have had no mechanicnal issues in the just about five years that we've lived here. We've never had to call for service on them. We're lucky that they've served us well and are now super excited to send them on their way and bring in their shiny new replacements!

The Big Day

Our new stove and dishwasher arrive tomorrow!!! I'm so excited to cook on a normal stove and use a dishwasher that is versatile and quiet to boot! As a bonus my kitchen will appear at a (very quick) glance to be at least of this century... you know, if you can ignore the green marble-y linoleum floor and matching Formica counter tops :)

In Spring Cleaning news, today I gave the living room and play room some TLC. They're mostly sparkling and smell like a field of lavender. The sofa covers are still in the process of being washed and dried since that's pretty much an all-day process, but otherwise things are looking great in there.

There is one bookshelf we have in the play room that I wanted to be able to clear off and move out, but I ran out of time for that today. I'll be sure to get to it tomorrow or Friday though because we're going to need that space for a certain bella bambina's upcoming 2nd birthday present :) Having a child is seriously sometimes like being a kid again. I can get so excited about giving her something I know she'll love as if I were the one getting an awesome gift. I guess in a way I am... ah, I love being a mommy!

Here are a few pictures from today:

Moving Right Along

As the painting portion of the Great Kitchen Upgrade of 2012 comes to a close, it's time to start piecing the room back together at least enough to make it functional. It probably won't last long since our stove and dishwasher are due to be delivered this coming Thursday and our tile still has to be put down. Not to mention, I plan to start painting our cabinets as soon as I'm finished painting walls around here (whenever that might be ;)

So once we got the hutch moved out, we regained something like 20 square feet along that side of our kitchen. Our table had formerly been kind of floating out in the floor mostly because the hutch was on the wall. Without the hutch my original thought was to place the table's longer side on that wall with a bench against the wall instead of chairs. Since I had finally finished painting I was excited to see what this arrangement would look like. 

Please ignore the horrible lighting in all of these pictures :D

Sadly, it wasn't as perfect as I'd imagined. There were a couple of issues. One was the fact that this chair couldn't slide out. We use that mini fridge for beverages and we love it, but there's not really a better place in the kitchen for it than in that corner, which interferes with the chair when the table is placed there. We also have our pile-o-tile at the opposite end of the table, so once that's on the floor we'd also be able to move the table a foot or two in that direction. But for now, this arrangement isn't going to work.

The up side was that it left pretty much a dance floor in the middle of the kitchen! Also, the dog crate is officially gone. Fear not though, the little guy seems to be adjusting just fine :)  

In the long run that vast dance floor will be taken up by a peninsula so it's going to make sense for the table to be long-side-against-the-wall. We're planning to take out that skinny cabinet there beside the dishwasher and add 2-3 cabinets in its place. The new ones will be facing 90-degrees to the left to create the peninsula. With that in place, we'll want the table to mirror the length-wise orientation so things don't get too crowded.

Meanwhile, I decided to place the table short-side-against-the-wall. All chairs slide out.......

.....and we still pretty much have a dance floor at least fit for a toddler ;)

Moving right along, I've started on the stairway/upstairs hallway which is the last area of the house that I'm painting (for now). Since I can't reach the top of the wall on the lower end of the stairway (that'd be why the paint stops 3/4 of the way up the wall), we need to borrow a bigger ladder from a friend. Please also disregard the atrocity that is our 1987 light fixture. We have new ones waiting to go up :) 

And while the stairway is kind of one big wall, the hallway itself is full of doors and odd angles = lots of cutting in. 

I'm sure you can imagine I'm really excited to paint between these door frames-

I did buy a tiny paint brush with hopes of being able to get in those tiny spaces with it. I guess we'll see how it goes. Thankfully I was able to get all the cutting in finished in one shot, so my goal today is to knock out the rolling. I can't even express how ready I am for our walls to finally be finished ...and for paint supplies to be out of sight, but mostly for the walls to be finished :)

Drywall Repaired!

I finally finished repairing the three corners of our drywall that had weird cracking issues going on. If you've ever had to repair drywall corners, you know it's not a simple or enjoyable process. It actually sounded initially like the type of project I would love but it got old quickly. There's something I find satisfying about spackling (I can't even explain it, it's just who I am), so I figured this would be like a gigantic spackling project and I would just love making it all smooth and perfect. If only it were that easy. Drywall compound is a lot thinner than spackle because it's meant to be applied it several thin layers. Then there's like a 24-hour drying time between layers, and I just didn't have the patience for that. I was working at 10:00 pm after C was in bed for the night and I mostly just cared about covering up the stupid mesh drywall tape (it is now on my list of enemies). Not only is drywall compound difficult to work with but you also can't just sand it with some sandpaper like you do with spackle. It gets sanded with a wet sponge - as made clear on the container. Actually, the container was pretty scary and recommended a mask and avoiding creating any dust from it (hence the wet sponge). So if there are imperfections in your application, the wet sponge is not sanding them away. The results are less than perfect, but good enough for me for this house. Is that terrible? I took some pictures on my phone but they're not much to share - it's just the corner of a wall. You can't even tell what you're looking at. The significance of it however, is that I can now start arranging things the way I want them to ultimately be. The table can now go against that wall freeing up lots of space in the middle of the room, and the dog crate can be officially retired. It has been in the middle of the floor as well, so it seems like a good time to just move it out of the kitchen instead of nestling it back in it's little corner. So, while corner repairs themselves aren't super exciting, having them done means another step in the process of getting this kitchen completed!

So... what's next? Our stove and dishwasher are being delivered next Wednesday - woot! We'll finally have all 4 appliances the same color. Before then, I just need to finish painting one wall in the kitchen and get behind the stove and refrigerator. We still don't have an official install date for our tile :( But the weather is getting really nice, and I'm hoping to get started on painting our cabinets once we make the transition to consistently warmer temperatures. I'll need to use our deck outside so it has to be warm enough for me to do that.

In other news, our baby is cuter by the day. I need to do a big update post on her before she officially turns 2. I can't believe that milestone is upon us already! She and I spent the morning outside. We had to meet up with someone who bought our double stroller (I had bought it on craigslist when I was babysitting and decided not to hang on to it). Our meeting place was so close to this little park near the airport that we decided to go watch some "hairplanes" as C calls them.

There were daffodils in full bloom :D

"Bye bye hairplane! Bye bye!"

Mommy & C

We had a great time watching the "hairplanes" and running around. There is a playground there and a bike/walking path but C mostly just wanted to run around. She found some pine cones which I'm fairly certain she's never seen before. She spoke to an elderly gentleman who was taking a break from bike riding and he thought she was pretty funny. And finally after about an hour and a half we left, mostly because I needed to pee. We came home to some beans & rice for lunch (I made my version of a burrito bowl with some romaine, salsa, cheese, and avocado) and she has been snoozing soundly for over 3 hours. I am so in love with today's weather and I can not wait until we can consistently have outside time every single day! You might recall we were a bit house-bound this time last year since I was babysitting my nephew. I had the above-mentioned double stroller, but taking a walk is only so exciting day after day. I'm so anxious to be able to go out and do fun summer outdoor things whenever we want this year, even if it's just splashing in the wading pool at Nana's! 

Stay tuned for a dedicated update post on C as we approach her 2nd birthday, and of course more on the kitchen as it comes together. What have you been doing with the spring weather? Outdoor fun? Home improvement projects? 

Kitch-in-Progress

We're moving right along in the kitchen. I wish I could say I've got my drywall cracks all sealed up, but I don't. I do however have a good number of things out of the kitchen and a pile of cash in my wallet instead!

I've been selling things with great success and the kitchen is looking much better for it. The hutch I hated is finally gone for good (donated) and I've been able to shove things around to make the room a little more functional while we're still in the process of improvements.

Saggy old hutch, covered in stuff. I used to have cook books on the somewhat-empty shelf, but pared down my collection and put them in a cabinet in preparation for giving this monstrosity the heave-ho. To the left of it lived our mini-fridge where we store beverages and a 12-bottle wine fridge. To the right of it lived our pile-o-tile and the dog's crate. These things together took up the entire 10.5' wall, pushing our kitchen table that much further out into the middle of the room and basically sucking up 30-ish square feet of our kitchen.

But alas, the hutch is gone :)

Clearly we still have the pile-o-tile, but that is being scheduled for install in the next few weeks so it's fine there for now. I haven't been able to bring myself to take the dog crate out either, mostly because he loves it and hangs out in there so much. I feel like it would be the equivalent of bulldozing his house. I don't want him to feel like I've totally eliminated a space for him in our house, but we really don't have another place on our main level to put his crate. He doesn't stay in it when we leave the house anymore, so it's just his little hangout. Anyway, I plan to move it, just not yet. As for the junk all over the table, it's mostly displaced items waiting to find their new home in the rearrangement of things and/or waiting to be sold/donated. That's just a detail that I don't have time to worry about right now.

My plan is to center the kitchen table on that newly-open wall with a bench along the wall instead of chairs (when the tile and dog crate are gone, it will fit nicely, it's only about half the length of the wall). I'd like to put a nice piece of art up above the table and then some open shelves on either side of that where I can put some books and other decorative/display items. This should make our kitchen look really huge (it is the entire back third of our house) and leave plenty of room for me to add a peninsula beside our dishwasher where our cabinets currently end. It's too close to our sliding door to leave an over-hang for bar stools, but having the extra counter and cabinet space will make it more than worthwhile. We decided not to do that right now because we're not doing our countertops right now, and we definitely want the peninsula in place at the time we install new counters.

Some of the other things we've recently bid a fond farewell, adieu, good riddance to:

Football-shaped crock pot. A gift we never once used. $20

A set of 3 very pretty casserole dishes that took up TONS of cabinet space and again, we never used. $30

A spice rack full of spices I never used. I realized one day that all the spices I do use are in a cabinet, so why keep spices on the counter and in the cabinet?? Just get rid of the ones I don't use. $20

A non-working wine fridge. It stopped staying cold one day (a long time ago) and someone was willing to take it off our hands. Wohoo!

So the process continues, but we're moving right along. I'm really excited to be sending so much stuff out the door to folks who can actually use it. It's going to make spring cleaning so much more fun! There's just nothing easier to clean than a nice empty room :)

All It's Cracked Up to Be

Ah, home ownership :)

I've gotten the majority of the kitchen painted. Yay! The current speed bumps we're working around are some drywall cracks. There are three and they're all in corners. Two of them in fact are on either side of the semi-wall between our kitchen and dining(play) room. The third is along the same side of the house, in the back corner of the kitchen. We have similar cracks on our second level as well, but that's a different project!

I think the problem is really that the walls were just not done properly. We've long suspected some water damage on this side of the house (all along our far left wall). When we first bought the house one of the conditions in the contract we presented was repair to what was obviously water damage on that wall in the dining room. The upstairs bathrooms are right above the dining room and kitchen on that wall and whenever water is running upstairs you can hear what sounds like dripping if you're on the main level. We have yet to see any visible damage from said dripping and are honestly just too paranoid to open up the drywall and investigate. All of this is to say that I'm pretty confident that the walls along that side of the house have been repaired/replaced since the house was built. At that, they were not done very well. It's possible that the owner prior to us (we're not exactly sure how many there have been, but the house was built in 1999) repaired/replaced the drywall only when they were ready to sell. The entire house was spray painted - poorly - all one off-white color in a flat finish (which hides imperfections) and I kind of doubt anyone lived like that.

It appears to me that in some spots drywall tape may have been used without any drywall joint compound. In other places it looks like compound was used without tape. To be honest, it doesn't even look like drywall tape. I don't think I'd be at all surprised if it turned out to be blue painter's tape. Gah.

 Dining(play) room -- clearly some tape, but what kind?

 Corner just on the other side of the wall from the photo above. Also some visible tape (see that wavy spot?). This makes me wonder if it's painter's tape and not actual drywall tape which should have been scraped down onto joint compound then covered by joint compound. I think that's just tape with paint over it!

The back corner of the kitchen (so, damaged left wall of the house meets back wall of the house). I can't even tell if there is any tape here. The crack is directly in the corner with no visible tape edges.

So we're going to pick up some tape and compound and get those corners patched pronto so that the painting can finally be finished! I can't wait to put the kitchen back together. It's pretty much a nightmare. On the bright side of that, I have sold a bunch of stuff we don't use/need anymore and made about $100! I'm just using the cragslist-like board that my school district has and listing stuff on there. It's nice because I can meet people at the schools where they work and not have to worry about strangers coming to my house or going to their houses. Plus you have to pass a background check to work for a school system and that makes me feel better too (not saying there aren't any weirdos working in school systems, I've encountered a few of them myself).

Also, our appliance delivery has been pushed back to March 14. Apparently Best Buy didn't properly account for the number of appliances they would sell during their Presidents' Day sale. But we have a dinner meeting tonight with our architect and tile guy! Hopefully it's all good news and we'll have a tile layout and possible install date by the end of the night. Hooray for some progress :)

Appliance Shopping Success

After doing lots and lots and lots (and lots) of online homework, J and I finally felt like we had narrowed down our field of potential appliances for the kitchen. At the outset I honestly thought doing that research would be fun and interesting - I enjoy design and decorating and often like perusing such things even when I'm not actually looking to buy. This was so much different than I expected! I did have fun at first, but then when I would find something I liked, then find too many bad reviews about motors blowing up in just a few months of use, or discover that a beautiful appliance had no features, or it was beyond our price range... well you can imagine. It got frustrating. We did have some specifications that we had to stick to so we couldn't just pick something from our price range and call it good.

We thought it would be ideal to find all three appliances (refrigerator, stove, and dishwasher) at the same retailer so we could easily schedule one delivery. That hope was short lived. We also had to have the counter-depth refrigerator and really wanted to avoid another side-by-side. We were ok with top freezer or bottom freezer with one top door, and french-door was the favorite. The stove and dishwasher I wasn't as particular about but still wanted them to be intelligent choices. We had to have hidden buttons on the dishwasher with our curious toddler around. She would never leave buttons on the front alone. As it is, we're lucky to have a difficult dial or she would have the dishwasher running randomly throughout the day. We also of course wanted them to match reasonably if they weren't going to be the same brand. We have to live with them for a few years until we're ready to move so I didn't want to just take whatever I could find.

All that said, we scoured online, found a few prospects and decided to peek around some nearby stores to see if there were any good deals there. Luckily a few stores had already started their Presidents' Day sales, so we did find some really good prices. After some browsing we selected all three appliances from HHGregg. We went back two days later and our dishwasher was no longer available. The stove was floor model only which I wasn't comfortable with, and there were just 4 of the refrigerator of our dreams (and for the price of our dreams- on a closeout sale for just $1,710) left in the warehouse. We got the fridge for next-day delivery and decided to go back to the drawing board for our dishwasher and stove.

The fridge was delivered Thursday and looks spectacular! The function isn't bad either, haha ;) While it is a relatively small fridge at 19.8 cubic feet of interior space, it fits beautifully in our kitchen and for the first time in almost 5 years our pantry door opens all the way! Luckily we don't store that much food around here with just two adults and a toddler. Our fridge primarily keeps milk, yogurt, eggs, butter, condiments and a few containers of leftovers which we either eat or clear out on a weekly basis. The freezer also feels smaller (though I'm not sure if it is based on cubic feet since the side-by-side freezer was pretty small) but I was still able to fit everything we had into it comfortably. Again, we don't store that much extra food.

Anyway, enough chatter... shall we take a look?

Hello, glorious new fridge! Why, are those hinges I see on that pantry door??

Allow me to briefly refresh your memory as to how our pantry has opened for the past 5 years...

About 45 degrees, right? A total pain to stand beside the pantry and reach in with half of your body. I don't even think this picture does it justice. I really should have taken a picture with someone standing there to show just how annoying it was. But alas, this is no more...

Our pantry door now opens almost a full 90 degrees! I really could slap the person who decided that the  refrigerator should be placed where the pantry door opens, but I think we have made the best of that with our little counter-depth beauty :) J and I have each caught ourselves standing beside the pantry with the door barely ajar reaching in. Such a nice realization to swing that door open a little further and actually stand in front of the pantry for the first time. 

As for the other two appliances, they are ordered and should be delivered on March 5th. I was so disappointed to have to go back and start doing more research to find new ones after our first picks fell through, but I think we're actually better off. I decided to go with Whirlpool after reading a Consumer Reports article showing they had the fewest number of service calls for the past 15 years in a row. The appliances that were in our house when we bought it were/are all Whirlpool (and I'm fairly certain they're the originals that were installed when the house was built in 1999) and so far none have needed repair since we've lived here. I found a dishwasher at Best Buy with tons of features, positive reviews and on sale for a steal at $411. We found a matching Whirlpool stove from Best Buy also for just $600. Our expectations were that we'd spend about $2,000 on the fridge and then get as close to $500 (or less) as possible for the dishwasher and stove. And we have success! 

I'm super excited for the other appliances to get here so we can have the whole set (they actually all match surprisingly well for being different brands). In the mean time, the hutch is clear and just needs to be taken out of the kitchen. Then I'll be finishing up my cutting in on that wall and repairing some corners so I'm ready to roll-- paint roll, that is. I'd love to get all rolling done in the kitchen during one good long nap time. I'll have to wait until J is home to help me move the stove and fridge so I can't paint behind them, but everything else can be done at nap time. I'd like all the paint done by the time the new appliances get here. We had a pre-tile consultation with our tile-laying helpers and that looks like it should be happening within the next month or so as well. Yay!

After paint, appliances and tile, the only thing left to do in the kitchen is painting the cabinets. Hopefully by the time the other stuff is done the weather will be warming up a little bit and I'll be able to get started on that project out on our deck. Can't wait! :)  Anyone else doing any make-overs at home? Has anyone painted their cabinets? If so, what's your best piece(s) of advice? I have a pretty clear plan based on what I know has worked perfectly for others, but I'm always open for pointers.