Finally, The Kitchen Reveal

There's an old country saying that, with apologies to the grammar mavens, 

goes something like this:

I ain't what I ought to be

I ain't what I'm gonna be

But praise the Lord...

I ain't what I was.

Rip Van Kitchen ~ Before

I should have been ashamed to yak about it,
but I introduced Rip Van Kitchen back in THIS POST,
 right after I stripped the terra cotta plaid wallpaper 
and extra large '80s fruit border. 

Then, I painted it yellow.  

We still had the yukky vinyl floors and the oakish cabinets with their shiny brass hinges and (not knobs, but) handles. Why each drawer had two of them, I do not know.  That vanilla colored counter was laminate and in about the same shape as the floor. Unfortunately, you can't throw rugs over a counter.

Pathetic. 

But I had a plan in my head,
and it looked something like this:

My version of a farmhouse kitchen.

Dove white paint for the cabinets,
and beadboard for the soffits.

We wanted a few glass doors so we had someone with a router
 cut the center out of two of them.

Glass panes were $5.00 each and installed at the glass shop. 

You can't really see it in these pictures,
but  the inside is backed with beadboard.
I filled  it with mostly white dishes.
~ Plus a little pop of red.

Hidden hinges weren't in the budget for this phase of the project,
but we used white ones to make it as seamless as possible.

Black knobs are new, but the pulls  are the old ones painted oil rubbed bronze.
One  pull per drawer, thankyouverymuch. 

Stop looking at the baseboard. We haven't finished the shoe molding yet. 

We did replace the old off white outlets and switches with new white ones.
That was such a little thing, but it made a big difference.
I don't know why I didn't do it sooner.

As you can see, a backsplash wasn't in the budget yet either.

We did get a (solid surface) countertop, though...
Which necessitated a new sink...
Which just begged for a new faucet. 

There was an old lady who swallowed a fly...

Please notice how the counter picks up the color of the new floor. I stressed over that. 

And I guess I'll mention the new dishwasher.
I did not want to buy a new one, but you can blame Cascade for just so long.

~ So says the husband...

It's the reason that a built- in microwave 

will have to be part of the next project as well. 

I'm not complaining.

It  just gives me something to look forward to. 

 I'll just rest my wearies at the bar and sit a spell. 

I have to sit there, of course,

 because it's the only place to sit right now. 

I can't bring that old table and chairs 

into this new kitchen without a face lift, can I?

No, I don't think so either.  

 And so, the project continues for another day.

'Cause it's the song that doesn't end...

It just goes on and on my friend... 

*****

By the way, those windows were washed inside and out with so much vinegar, the place smelled like a salad bar. It's just a glare. Felt the need to mention that in case the Duchess reads this. 

Ralph the Grout-ch and the Great Tile Disaster

Have I mentioned that I'm tiling my kitchen floor?

Just thought I ought to start with that just in case one person in one corner of Blogville hasn't heard me gripe and moan about it.

When I say that I'm tiling it, I really mean it, too. Aside from laying that cement board on weekend #1, I have been there for every inch of the journey.  Until I injured my thumbs with the wet saw (Don't worry I still have both of them...) I was the tile cutter. After that, I was basically the Ralph to the Alf.

photo source

Do you see the look of pain on Ralph's face?  Yeah, well, I'm pretty sure what she was doing just prior to this moment. She was probably on her hands and knees grouting the tile in an ever-expanding kitchen.

All by herself.
In the middle of monsoon season.
While Alf was out of town.

I'll bet she had to lug buckets of grouty water through a piney stick forest in the middle of that monsoon to wash them out, too.

Under a hot pink umbrella.

So you can imagine how thrilled I was last Thursday night when I went to bed having finished the kitchen proper. I still had the hallway to the powder room and beyond, but I could see a  light at the end of the tunnel.

Unfortunately, when I woke the next morning

 and turned the corner to admire my work, 

I also saw this. 

Notice anything?

Don't even try to pretend that you don't.

What in the world?

Now folks, that particular part of the floor was one of the first parts laid in mortar. We did it weekends ago and have walked over it ever since.  I even showed a picture of it on here.  Never, not one time, did I notice that one tile was clearly lighter than all the rest.

At first, I decided that it was grout haze so I washed it. Then, I washed it again, this time with a little vinegar/water solution. It made no difference whatsoever.

I admit it. At that point, I threw the sponge in my hand across the room, sat down on the floor, and cried.

Then, I did what any responsible adult would do in said situation. I called my sister and had a big old blat over the phone to her. I sent copies of that photo to everyone in my family, and then I tweeted the words I quit so all that 9 people who follow me on twitter would feel sorry for me.

And then, I did quit for a while. I got in Ebenezer and took those river pictures that posted earlier in the week.  Just after lunch, I got a call from the Farm Sister.

"I'm at the hardware store," she said, "and I bought the little tool we're going to need to rescue the floor. "

Grout saw: About 4 bucks.

Yes indeed. Instead of crying and quitting, the Farm Sister got on the internet and figured out how to remove a single tile. She would be here in 30 minutes and was bringing her caulking gun for good measure. (The Farm Sister is the Caulk Queen in the family. She doesn't drink as much coffee as the rest of us.)

While she caulked my cabinets,  I sawed away all the grout surrounding that tile with the handy little tile saw. I don't know how long it would take you, but it took me about an hour to get it completely out.

Then, we took a hammer, closed one eye, and bammed the tile until it began to break up.

Then, we pulled up every piece of tile with that chisely looking thing and a flat head screwdriver. For the dude on the internet, it came up in big hunks. For us, it came up in little pieces. It doesn't matter though. The important thing is that it came up.

When the husband came home late that night,

 this is what he saw. 

I happy to report that he was able to set a new one the next day, and I was eventually able to grout it with very little noticeable grout line issues.

And there she sits today, well blended with all the others. 

And thus ends the tale of Ralph the Grout-ch and the Great Tile Disaster. To be honest? I'm glad that it happened. Now I know that I can not only  lay tile but repair a tile as well. I can even repair grout if I have a mind to.

Not that I have a mind to...

All you need is a grout saw, a hammer, a chisel, and a sister.

We are strong. We are invincible. We are Tile Women.

Frostine, Frostine, the Tile Queen

Just a little before, after, and during to share this morning.

I interrupted my marathon kitchen painting last week to step outside and enjoy some unseasonable blossoms in the back yard.

We're kind of used to our Japanese magnolia blooming whenever in the world she pleases. She has shown up in January before.

I can't remember the azaleas ever joining her, though.

 That was then...

This is now.

As you can see, what passes for winter here in south Georgia arrived this past weekend. It frosted the bloom  off the rose.

And the azalea and magnolia too.  

Do you want to know what I was doing in those frosty temperatures? 

I was outside dressed like the unibomber cutting tiles with a wet saw. 

Yes indeed, as soon as the temperatures even remotely allowed it, we had to jump on our tiling project. We didn't really have a choice.  The man of the house is only home on the weekend, and the lady of the house can't be trusted around power tools.  We worked in tandem.

He measured;
 I cut. 

He mixed mortar and laid the tile; 

I narrated and handed him spacers.

We're using 18 inch square tiles so it's supposed to go a little faster.

So far, we've put down 43 full tiles
and 
36 cut tiles. 

Aside from an area around the hot water heater which made me cry,

 I cut every single one of them, too. .

Pretty good, if I do say so myself. 

All told, that's almost 80 pieces of tile. By our calculations, we are just over a fourth of the way finished with the laying.  And then, there is grouting, of course. And sealing.

Can someone please remind me why I thought it was a good idea
 to paint the cabinets in the middle of it all? 

Meet Katrina the Kitchen

My kitchen is Katrina.

That was my comment in my last post before I was called away from Blog Land for a while.  I said it kind of tongue-in-cheek at the time, but today I have something to share.

My kitchen is Katrina.

This time, I really mean it. 

That's because after years and years of waiting,
 I am finally getting a new kitchen floor.

The old one was the bane of my existence. It was made up of textured vinyl squares which were nearly impossible to get clean. We inherited it with the house, and it stretched and stretched and stretched to include two eating areas, a powder room, and a laundry room. That's one of the reasons it has taken so long.  This is a huge project. 

The other reason has to do with genetics.

I married a Scottish boy, you see, and we don't do a thing around here until we have the cold, hard cash to do it.  We actually purchased the tile two years ago, not long after I finally stripped the wallpaper and repainted my big fat  80's kitchen.  It has been squatting in the garage ever since.

A few weeks ago, Old MacFrugal decided that he was going to lay that new floor himself, with the help of a few good men who will forever more be called my heroes. 

First, though, we had to pull up the ugly vinyl.

It was trying hard to be glued to this plywood layer which had to removed as well. It served no useful purpose other than to be covering yet another layer of vinyl.  I would have snapped a picture, but at that point the men were getting a little bit testy.

They finally got it all off and ready to be covered with cement board. 

Woohooo!

Those wonderful men worked and worked and worked and finally got every room of cement board installed.

And then, the project stalled as well. 

As you might recall, the husband travels during the week and can only honey-do on the weekends. This coming weekend, we'll be in Atlanta with his family, which means that this floor... in all its glory... will be the floor in my kitchen until further notice.

The good news is, I don't have to mop.

The bad news news is I have one hot mess. 

.

Powder room, laundry, and pantry doors off their hinges.

A washer, dryer, stove, and refrigerator 

living in the garage along with all my kitchen furniture. 

A toilet on the back deck.

Welcome to Georgia. 

I tried to hide it behind the old plywood just in case the neighbors can peep
through the piney stick forest. The dead plant is a nice touch too, don't you think?

And that's the way it stands.

But wait! There's more.

 You see, I'm taking advantage of the floorless kitchen

to embark on another kitchen project while the husband is out of town. 

Apparently, I'm just not content with a little mess.
I have to make a royal one.

Musta been da debil...

  Can you tell what it is?


*****

I want to thank you for the kind emails that you sent after the passing of my mother-in-law last week. I apologize for not responding individually yet. I had honestly been too busy to check the computer until a day or so ago but am determined to get caught up soon.  

My Big Fat 80's Kitchen

If you’ve read here long, you know I’m one of those people with the quirky need to name my stuff.

My car is Ebenezer.

The GPS is Gypsy.

My debit card is Debi.

I spell it that way in my head

so as not to confuse myself.

The list goes on…

Although I would love little more than to move to the country and dub my home with a poetic name, I have not named our house. Even in Debbie Land, it seems a bit silly to name a home in a 20 year old subdivision. So though I long for my Pine Knoll, my house is just called The House.

My kitchen, on the other hand, has a name.

And it’s Rip Van Winkle.

I named it after the man in the story who fell asleep for twenty years only to wake up a misfit in the world around him.  Yes indeed. Rip Van Kitchen is so stuck in the 80s that it has big hair.

Plaid wallpaper...

With a huge fruit border...

To be fair, the fruit was added in the 90s. I put it up to cover the original colonial blue border that said “Welcome Friends”.  I think it even had pineapples.

It was supposed to be a temporary fix.

Sigh...

The wallpapered kitchen went along with the rest of the wallpapered house. When we bought the house, it was covered with roughly 2,800 square feet of the stuff. Aside from the living room, every single room had either paper or border. Some had both.

It didn’t bother me at the time. I like a challenge. Of course, I was also over a decade younger and had more of a stripper’s body back then, too. I jumped right in, and over the first few years, did my stripping act all over the place.

In the den…

Up the stairs…

In the bedrooms…

In the home office…

In the bathrooms…

Had I been a blogging stripper, I'd have pictures…

But Rip Van Kitchen kept getting put on the back burner. Yes, I realize that it’s the heart of the home. Yes, I know that it’s supposed to be the priority room …Yes, I know it affects property value…
Wok Wok Wok Wok Wokkkk….

Rip stayed stuck in the 80s. 

Basically, there were three reasons:

First? Money. We’re committed to this cash only thing, and other room fixes were cheaper. The kitchen is the big Kahuna. We need want a new floor, and new cabinets, and new countertops, and sink, and lighing, and ...

Well, you get it.

Second?  My serious obsession with the big Ta Da.  I could have done any one of those updates over the years. I could have at least stripped that wallpaper and painted the walls for goodness sake, but oh no…

Oddball as it may be, it is more acceptable in Debbie Land to apologize for a kitchen with big hair for over a decade than to complete a portion of a project.

I know. Sad, isn’t it?

But mostly? Fear. You see, stripping wallpaper in this house has given me sheetrockaphobia. This is the irrational fear that wallpaper has been gorilla glued to bare walls and will come down in one inch fragments, bringing the sheet rock with it…

…which results in major reconstruction

 and unkind sputterings about builders and previous owners.

I would rather avoid it.

So in true Debbie Fashion,

 I have neglected Rip Van Kitchen for over a decade.

But blogland has an uncanny knack of inspiration.

So I decided to do a little experiment. I pulled the refrigerator away from the wall, soaked the paper behind it in a solution of fabric softener and hot water, closed one eye, and peeled….

And guess what? It wasn’t raw sheet rock! Nope. It had been painted beneath and came off fairly easily.

So I kept on stripping…

And stripping…

And stripping…

And by the time I finished,

 it looked like this.

No ugly wallpaper!

No fingernails either, but they'll grow back.

All told, the Great Stripping Adventure took about two weeks. The soffits were the biggest pain. Half of the wall paper was attached to bare wood there. This part came off in millimeter sized pieces most of the time, but I stuck with it.

So there you have it:

How Rip Van Kitchen

 became

 Strip Van Kitchen.

 Of course, I jumped off Stripper Mountain with no clear vision as to where to go next... 

I know. Sad, isn't it?

So if you see me peeking around in your kitchens with a notepad and shiny red Kodak, don't be startled. Be flattered. I'm just looking for some inspiration.

****

By the way, I feel the oddball need to say that I took a few days away from blogland to spend undivided time with my two favorite college girls who were home for fall break.  I'm sure you missed me, right? right?

Yeah... that's what I was afraid of.