Do it herself

So besides the bathroom demo, I also started on a kitchen project. I've talked before about the stupid built in cutting board in the kitchen. It is seriously, the dumbest thing I've ever seen. Why, oh why, would you build a cutting board into the counter and not seal it to the counter or seal the wood underneath? That is just asking for a nasty, super germ incubating ground! Because we are having to replace the bathroom instead, I've decided to at least do my best to make sure the problem doesn't get an worse.

This is what the wood looked like when I started

Notice the black spots? Yeah, that was rotten wood. I don't know if you can tell it from the picture but there are bits of loose wood and food all over this thing. I started by wiping it off with bleach, then ran the vacuum cleaner over it get all the pieces. As I was running the vacuum over it, it was pulling off more chunks of wood from those black parts. Now, my vacuum is pretty good but it ain't that good! I grabbed my scissors and starting scraping at the wood and watched it basically crumble under my touch. I eventually scraped off most of the really rotten wood and filled in the gaps with wood glue.

As you can see, that is no small area that the glue was required to fill! Of course, with that much glue, it takes some time to dry. It has been drying for over 24 hours and looks like it will take another day, at least. Once it is dry, I'm going to sand it down smooth, then put poly on it, like I did the table. Once that is done, I'm going to get a new cutting board to cover it up (one that isn't yellowed and cut up from use). It won't be pretty but it will work and it will keep the damaged from getting any worse. This is a minor repair now but if the wood rotted all the way through, it would have been a huge pain in the neck to fix!

With both of these projects, I've done them almost completely by myself (MF "helped" me yesterday by handing me tools while I was on the ladder and both kids took a whack at breaking the drywall). RF was at work both days. With all the snow, he has pulled down a boat load of overtime. 13 hours yesterday and 4 today, which left me to do my worst on the house!

Kitchen remodel

Part of the reason we wanted to buy this house was that there was nothing that HAD to be done to move in. There were, and still are, things we want to do but we didn't have to do anything to be able to live here. The kitchen was probably the ugliest part of the house but it still wasn't that bad.

Because the living room and kitchen are all one big space, we had J and K Painting go ahead and do the kitchen the same color as the living room, which is Latte. As it was going on, I kept thinking "This is ok", then it started to dry and looked almost chocolate and I didn't like I would be able to tolerate it. Once it dried completely, it was a nice medium brown color that really looks great with the white of the cabinets.

You can sort of see the sink in the above picture but what you can't see is that it was a beat up, white porcelain mess that didn't have a sprayer or a garbage disposal. The faucet was too low to be able to fill my tea pitcher with and it was a very shallow sink. I was able to put one bowl and one plate in the sink before it looked like it was overflowing.

Somewhere along the line, I got signed up for ReStore newsletter and I told RF I wanted to check it out a couple of weeks ago, while we were looking for a table. Worst case, they had nothing and we had wasted 20 minutes. While we were there, we saw that they had some pretty decent stainless steel sinks. We ended up picking one up for $15. We got it all apart this morning and I threw it in the bathtub and scrubbed it clean. It looks almost brand new! We had planned to use the hardware that was on the current sink because while it wasn't the latest, greatest, it was here and it didn't cost any extra money. While we were out getting a few things last night, I ran across a nice high neck faucet that came with a sprayer. It was in brushed nickel so it looks like it matches the sink pretty well.

RF and my FIL spent the morning getting it all installed

And installing my fancy new garbage disposal. We run into old school copper pipe so FIL recommended a better grind and one that was safe for septic systems. We got it and are just waiting for him to run power to it.