Coming along now,

View from outside on the porch looking through the kitchen door. Dining room is to the right, old fireplace and wood stove to the left.
(Just ignore the desk piled up with tools on the right.)

Faucets on their way...

Small faucet for the 12x12 island prep sink:
Bridge gooseneck faucet for the double undermount kitchen sink:

Both in brushed nickel and courtesy of overstock.com. Gotta love the $2.95 shipping!

Drum sanders hurt...

Its been a noisy night through that door. Three rented floor sanders and one owned one and five hours with 25 grit sandpaper have accomplished this:

Not even close to being done.
Whatever our mystery wood is - it is HARD.

I spent about an hour with the drum sander because I think I'm tough and can do anything. (Sean did make me go put shoes on after this photo below!)
Four blisters later (could they not make the handles padded?) I woosed out and opted for my dainty hand sander, starting to go over the dark spots.
That thing weighs about 100 lbs and you have to lift up and pull back on it to make it sand. I am suddenly not regretting all the money we have paid in the past to have someone refinish the floors in a previous home.
I don't think my arms will work in the morning.

I'm wining like a baby, I know. I think it was worse than labor...
Many kudos to my father in law and Sean for their hours and hours of monotonous sanding. Love you guys!

Kitchen walls!

"Tell them that I'm doing the job I hate the most with the woman I love the most," Sean says as I snap away with the camera.
He hates sanding drywall...
Have I mentioned that I love that he's going gray?
Would now be a good time to mention that a policeman helping me a few years ago when I ran out of gas thought that Sean was my father?
I was mortified and when I explained that Sean is indeed my husband, the cop gave me the dirtiest look ever.

And ooohhh...lookie here. Whats that?
Some fine looking muscles on my handsome husband! Eh hem...back to the kitchen...

While he's been sanding the walls, I've been sanding this:


And these:

And the edges of the floor. Sean'll tackle the rest with a big rented sander.
Any guesses on what kind of wood? I have no idea.
Two hundred year old something.

These walls that he's sanding will be where our main cabinets are. The cabinets, the oh so beautiful cabinets, are piled in mega boxes in that back room right now. Just waiting...

That cut out section of wall above is for my new fridge. I have to downsize fridges. Is that wrong or what? Seriously, that was the only place to fit a fridge in the kitchen - and I love that it'll be built in. We are definitely going to become those people who have the old clunker second fridge in the garage.
More updates soon on counter tops. Our slabs are in and soon to be delivered to my front lawn. Our neighbors had no idea what they were in for when we moved in. Have I mentioned that the nice folks across the street mow at least twice a week and have PERFECT mulch around every perfect tree and perfect bush and they mow in nice diagonal lines?
Nice people across the street - I'm so sorry... ;)

From Mr. Sandman to Digger Dan

I am so blessed to have a husband who can read up on just about anything and then tackle the project with gusto and have it come out beautifully!
We are not quite to the beautiful stage yet on this project. It'll be a while... Sean rented himself a digger thing. (Yes, I'm sure it has a more professional name than digger thing and our three year old probably knows it.) Anywho - Sean dug out around the lousy partially caved in, ant infested block foundation.
As an added bonus, he dug up turf beside the garden to double it in size for me. The extra turf filled in the endless Great Dane puppy diggin' ankle twisting holes.
As I mentioned, besides the carpenter ants, the fact that the yard sloped toward the house in this area, water got into the block foundation, froze, and pushed it out of place. Sean is debating getting a masonry estimate or doing it himself. Knowing Sean , I'm thinking he'll do it himself...

As a happy P.S. we got our house inspection fee returned to us since all this was missed in the inspection.

Oh-so-not-fun!

No, we weren't planning on rebuilding an exterior wall in the master bedroom with the pretty tin ceiling, but when Sean reached down and a chunk of wall came off in his hands and ants scurried everywhere it became evident that we have a mess on our hands.
Yes, that is a huge run-on sentence but I'm typing with one hand and holding a pacifier in place with the other. Sorry..

Sweet, handsome, wonderful Sean is out pulling out bushes so he can get into the wall and see how far the carpenter ants have devoured. That and trying to be a good Christian and not curse the day we paid big money for a house inspector to tell us everything was fine. That and praying jacking up the house and replacing a wall is something our insurance will cover.

"oh-la-dee, oh-la-da, life goes on..."

A Thousand Dollar Job part one

After finding out how much it would cost to have a new hearth laid and the fireplace in the new kitchen spiffed up, my brilliant Sean started reading on masonry.

He tore out the old crumbled hearth, put new supports in the basement below and began mixing cement.







The concrete dried overnight. Using bricks we had selvedged from the fireplace, Sean has begun laying them out and cutting them to fit the new hearth. It is slow work but looks fabulous. I can't wait to see the finished hearth!

In other news, here are some of the lights we've put in the new kitchen. Those beams will be stained and polished. A local home store is going out of business and we snagged a beautiful iron chandelier for above the island. Can't wait!