The Cabinets are Hung on the Walls with Care

The kitchen cabinets have been installed, and the island is in it's place.  The two cabinets on each side of the vent hood will have lights and glass shelves for display.  That will be fun to keep dusted, don't you think?

Another view...

They have part of the living room beams installed.

To the left of the fireplace the cabinet is full of display shelves.

To the right of the fireplace, this cabinet will hold the television.  This cabinet was delivered a little different than we thought, it's supposed to have shelves on both sides and the TV in the middle.

Beneath these shelves will sit the washer and dryer.

And check out all of the cabinets on the other side of the laundry room:

Our master bath has this great linen closet in it.

And here is some of the wonderful-ness that we like to call "our closet."

This is part of Shane's side of the closet, with rods, shelves and a shoe rack...

And this is the shoe cabinet that will be hidden by a mirror.

Here are the drawers for my running clothes and above will be shelves for out-of-season clothes.

This is a shoe rack on my side of the closet.  I'm willing to share, if necessary.

Here's a peek at the mother-in-law bathroom.  This is the tile that was supposed to go upstairs.

We opted to leave the misplaced tiles where they are rather than having them pulled up and relocated. 

The upstairs bathroom tile looks much better now that the grout has been applied.

Some of the window trim and baseboards have been installed.

Orange soda, anyone?

This is the upstairs bar in the game room.

And they are working on the staircase.

Our next task is to select the exterior stucco color.  As if choosing the "forever" color for our house isn't difficult enough, the stucco manufacture makes it even more challenging by providing color swatches that are less than an inch square.  So, Dana offered to have the colors mixed up and larger samples made. 

We like the yellow color, but as you can see, it is much too similar to the neighbors house color.  The grey looks too much like baby blue to me.  So we're going to have her mix up a darker grey and see  what we think.

An Early Delivery

Today was, by far, the best day yet.

Our cabinets were delivered EARLY

I love suprises and was a little excited...so, I might have about gazillion photos today.

This is the cabinet that surrounds the built-in refrigerator.

The cabinets on the left of the fridge pull out.  They go all the way to the 9-foot ceiling. 

I guess that's not where I'll store the spices.  Probably the stuff that gets used once every 10 years will live up there.

Speaking of spices, this pull out will have several shelves for spices.  There is one on each side of the stove. No more needing a step-stool to reach the spices at the back of the cabinet above the stove. 

Speaking of the stove, here's where the stove will be installed. See the skinny doors on each side? That's the spice shelves.

And there are two drawers under the stove.

I just love drawers.

And notice how the front of the cabinet is cut out?  That's because the knobs are on the front of the stove. Easier to clean when grease splatters out of the pan.

It's a beautiful stove.

And the best part of our stove?

It's a gas stove.  I love cooking on a gas stove.

And this pretty curved piece of wood is part of the cover for the vent hood above the stove.

This next little piece of beauty is just one of the cabinets that has pull out shelves.  

You know how hard it is to reach the stuff in the back of your cabinets?  Not with these little angels.

And the drawers on top are already divided for silverware.  I guess I can put my little plastic rubbermaid dividers in a garage sale.  They served me well, but I won't be needing them anymore.

This cabinet is part of our island.  The diswasher will go on the right side, with a skinny shelf on the end to absorb some of the noise.  (It won't really sit all caddy-whompus like this.)

Here is the cabinet for the oven and microwave/oven type thingy we have.  I'm not sure how the micro-thingy works, but I think it is a microwave most of the time, but when we need two ovens (holidays), we can also bake in it.

I just hope I can figure out how to make it warm up hot fudge for the other 11 months of the year.

Looking into the living room, the workers are getting the built-in shelves out of the way.  This is the one the TV will sit in.

And here are the cabinets on each side of the fireplace.  They are both upside down right now-no reason to worry, they are aware of this and will turn them over later.

The trim carpenter has drawn chalk lines on the ceiling of the living room so we can see where the beams will go.  Probably, it is less so that we can see where they will go and more so he knows where to put them.  He also made a sample beam so we could see how low they would hang.  We were worried that they would be too low.

Moving into our master bathroom...

Here you can see that they've hung some of the doors.  This door is to the linen closet in our bathroom.

Here is Shane's vanity.  His shower is in that door right beside it and takes up all of the space behind his vanity, if that gives you any idea of it's size.

His vanity is almost twice as large as the ones we had in the other house...

And here is my vanity. 

I think we'll both have plenty of room.

This is my vanity again.  The door on the left is our closet, the door on the right leads to the laundry room.

What a great idea-a laundry room that is near the master closet!

These drawers are in our master closet-on my side.

Shane is hoping that my running clothes will be kept in these drawers so that when I get up to run at 5:30 on Saturday mornings, he won't have to listen to the drawers open and close.

This cabinet is in the middle of our closet-it will have some hanging rods behind it.  What you are looking at will eventually be a full length mirror on hinges that hides shoes and a couple of small drawers.

They've put up much of the crown molding. 

We only have one problem.

Or two...

Today they installed the tile in the upstairs bath and in the mother-in-law bath.  But they switched them & have them in the wrong place.

This tile is in the larger, upstairs bathroom.

We like it, but we intended for it to go in the mother-in-law bathroom...a much smaller place.

Hmm...I only panicked for a little bit.

It's not terrible, but it messes up the placement of the coolest tile I selected.  I have to decide by tomorrow morning what we are going to do. 

Decisions, decisions.

Regardless of what we decide to do with the tile, I'm so thrilled with everything else that I may not sleep at all tonight!

Sweet dreams to all of you.

Ready for Cabinets

I didn't think there was any way they'd have tile ready for when the cabinets are delivered on Tuesday.  But when we were there today we discovered that a large part of it is ready.

The kitchen is finished.

I'm very pleased with the tile selection.

...and I'm equally pleased with the grout. I think it's just the right shade of darkness so it won't get stained. 

The master bath and laundry room are also tiled and grouted.

Well, not the entire master bath.  When they roughed in the plumbing, the pipes for my tub were put in the wrong place so someone has to come jackhammer the floor up in order to move the pipes back a couple of feet.  I assume that will happen soon so they can go ahead and finish tiling this area.

But, I could be wrong.

So, it looks like the tile will be ready for the arrival of the cabinets this Tuesday.  They should be able to set the kitchen and master bath cabinets where they belong.  Hopefully tomorrow they can finish up the powder bath, mother-in-law bath & upstairs bath.  All of that tile is pretty large, as well, so it should go quickly.

Tile and Granite

We went out to the granite warehouse today and made some selections for the kitchen, master bath and laundry.  A few weeks ago we made some preliminary selections, but these were our favorites for today.

Kitchen...

Master bath & laundry...

The pictures don't do them justice, the white one has little irridescent sparkles in it and the kitchen one is beautiful, too.

Back at the house, the tile guys have been busy today.  You can tell by the mess in the garage...

and the pile of broken tile scraps.

They have tiled all of the kitchen & harvest room area...

...and were working on the pantry/studio area while we were there.  You might be able to see they've left a path so get out of the studio without having to walk on the freshly set tile.

Here's the master bathroom.

Of course, it's still covered in some icky dust and you can't see the subtle stripes on it.  This view is looking into the laundry, they have the same tile.

More good news...we still had two sconses to pick out for the mud room area & a friend called this morning and had two extra sconces from when she built her house and they were still in the boxes.  She sent me a picture and we're going to use them.  Another score for April saving a penny or two. ;-)