It was not too soon

I worried in late May—two weeks ago—that we were beginning to get ready for the kitchen to be complete too early. Now it appears we may have been a bit tardy, at least on this issues on which we were focusing.

After workers last week reoriented on installing new oak flooring and refinishing those and the connecting spaces, the schedule changed, as did our daily life. While their time on task wasn’t more than a few hours each day, they precluded any other work and protecting the floor and finish meant we had no access to our basement stand-in kitchen, our laundry room, or our back door. This sounds minor, but it has been the biggest disruption of our lives so far.

And yes, the beauty of the floors is SO WORTH IT:

I learned Friday that starting on Monday—after the floors are protected—the mudders will finish the drywall and start to paint. Then cabinets will be installed! After cabinets are installed, the countertop will be measured and cut. This tells me that we are just a few weeks away from being complete, but we haven’t ordered some essentials.

Two of those essentials are the pendant lights over the island. We have procrastinated on ordering them because I have tried to find alternatives to the pricey versions that we like. Today we realized that the pricey ones can’t be delivered for about a month. We also don’t have the specs for details like the mirror in the 3/4 bath, that we plan to order from Etsy, or whether we need a new light fixture for the room. We meet with the project managers on Monday to determine what our current timeline is and how to meet it.

We also have to remake the mudroom, in which we did some self-demo at the last minute before the floor refinishing. We are very happy we did this, especially after seeing the dust and dirt behind the jury-rigged set-up that I had, ironically, assiduously cleaned. After much research, we ordered a new solution that will enable our new use of this space, which also needs to be of service to the 3/4 bath that we will enter through the mudroom. (Pictures to come!)

In short, we should soon see some major progress on what will be our kitchen and 3/4 bath. We will be able to use our back door. We will have a renewed mudroom. We will have access to our temporary kitchen and laundry.

Next week, Dan and I tackle clearing years of paint and wallpaper layers to prepare our master bedroom walls for renovations to the upstairs bathroom expansion.

Those should be some fun photos!