This weekend was a banner weekend in the ongoing 2-year renovation of the kitchen. We FINALLY installed a dishwasher! Also, we re-faced all of the bottom cabinets, stained the butcher block top, and re-ran a new copper line to the fridge (over a year after it burst during a cold snap and flooded the kitchen while we were away).

There are still tons of things to do, like sand, paint, finish installing hardware, new magnetic catches, add braces to the bar and re-frame the bar door, but he majority of the heavy lifting is over!

My nanny, mom, Lolly, & AC spend the weekend painting in AC's big girl room too...those pictures are at the end.

Below are a few pics of progress in the house:

New drawer fronts & door faces

newly stained & varnished bar top

New cabinet faces and dishwasher!

The tree & owl Owl behind the old window

it's getting there..

We drove up to mom & dad's Friday night to spend Saturday working on the cabinets in preparation for moving them to the house Sunday. One small problem: we realized about 1:15 into a 1:30 drive that I forgot the paint. Whoops! Oh well.

Saturday we got up, sanded everything down, put the cabinets together, and drove to BR. We spent a good majority of the day Saturday putting the cabinets together and installing the hardware. The doors need a little adjusting to line up all the reveals perfectly and there is still glass to be bought for the top doors, but overall it looks great!

Sunday, we drove to 3 different Home Depots to get the cup pulls we wanted (each store had 2 or 3...except for the last store in BFE which had about 100,000). I finished the day off by putting the baseboard back, putting in shoe molding, caulking, and doing some touch-up painting throughout the house. What you see below is essentially finished, minus the stain on the butcher block top. Overall, I'd say quite the success. I have the best dad. ever.

update:

Kitchen Diagram

THIS is why I love my dad. Bottom half of the new cabinet.

A little home update...

nothing quite as heavy this time, I promise.

Project update actually! Projects of note: Chicken coop, Kitchen, Girls' rooms.

Chicken coop - Well, it's mostly finished but since the Christmas day chicken massacre...we now have no chickens. That's right, I finished the house a week before the last chicken was mercilessly killed. Figures. So my next step is to get the black netting tied to the top of the thing so that chickens can't fly away and other animals can't get in there and eat them once we do actually get new chickens. I'll probably do that within the next month so I can go ahead and get chickens in early spring. I'm ready for fresh eggs dammit!

Kitchen - The upper cabinets on the south wall have been up for a couple of months and we chose the hardware that we'll have throughout the kitchen. 3 different types: cup pulls for the drawers, 6" bars for most of the doors, and simple knobs for the top glass doors. With the heater on full blast, a lot of the joints in the bead board are opening up so I'll have to caulk them and re-paint at the end of winter...hopefully for the last time. We're going to m0m & dad's the weekend of the 19th so dad and I can complete the cabinets for the north wall and I can bring them back to install them. The final step in the cabinet marathon will be to replace all of the cabinet faces and doors on the existing lower cabinets and repaint the inside of all of the cabinets white. All of this mess should be done in about a month so we'll have the bones of this baby in there. If our income tax check is a good one, we'll also buy our dishwasher and new counter & backsplash. I'd like to also get the new lighting...but we'll see. Baby steps.

new cabinets on the left...newer cabinets coming to the right

Girls' rooms - Em's room will get an update with all new decorations, while the furniture and paint will remain the same. Currently it's PACKED with all the bins of baby stuff we just pulled down from the attic. We got AC's big girl room painted this past week and she spent the last two nights in the room like a true big girl! Here's to hoping she keeps it up. We picked up a couple of pieces of furniture for her big girl room pictured below. These two need a lil TLC - mostly just paint - to get them ready for the room.

Big girl's dresser. what this picture doesn't show - it's actually flesh colored *shudder

(soon to be white)

Great Mid-Century piece...also soon to be painted. This will be her pantry for her little kitchen.

Whew! That's a lot of talking. I'll stop now and hopefully have a more picture-filled update again soon.

Welcome 2011

Aaand with a few weeks of the year behind me already, I can say that this year is bringing with it a little perspective. Funny how time (well...God) has a way of doing that.

Christmas weekend I was sick as a dog and missed out on seeing my extended family, my godchildren, and my grandma. Eh, whatever, right? They'll be there next weekend when I come in for New Year's Eve. ack. Not so much. Monday morning after Christmas, mom calls to say that dad's mom is in the hospital b/c of a fall. New Year's celebration (first big family NYE party in a decade) is cancelled and all the fireworks, etc are to be saved for the 4th. Mawmaw isn't doing that well, but she's still conscious and talking. We made a visit to the hospital in Alexandria to see her and AC got to visit with her and talk a bit. Fast-forward a week and I get the call to pack my suit and the girls and come home to the country for a funeral. Not the holiday season I'd hoped for...not by a mile. Losing someone is never easy, but time heals all pain. The toughest part was watching my dad say goodbye to his mom. My last grandparent and the person who taught me Cajun French (the little I know) and also helped to inspire my love of plants. We truly were a lucky family for having her and she will be truly missed.

We came back and got on down to business as usual. Wake up, work, daycare, dinner, rinse, repeat...all the while thinking about how odd it is that she's not there anymore. Lucky for her, after 22 years, she's with her husband. I bet that was a sight for sore eyes!

Anyways...looking around my house tonight, I'm extremely grateful. I have a beautiful wife who is carrying our second child...and looks amazing while doing it. We have a spunky little 2-yr old who throws her arms around my neck and says 'big hug daddy' and gives me a kiss. We have a great home (nothin fancy but we love it), dependable transportation, and a wonderful extended family that loves us very much. We both have jobs, and that's more than a lot of people can say. Do we love them? I can't say that. But they pay us and we have insurance, etc., and the lights and heat stay on in the house. Not bad.

Sure, we could always want more. That's human. But we don't really NEED more. Looking around, I see suffering of every kind. Lost loved ones. Strained relationships. Unemployment. Sadness & Suffering. It's easy to dismiss or ignore the plight of another and focus on your own unimportant whining. What's difficult to do is to tell yourself to shut up and be happy with what you've got.

Tonight I feel as though I've got better perspective on things. We're just an average American family moving through the maze of life, thankful for the chance to come home and be loved. Nothing special, nothing fancy. Just us.

Just average.

I like it.

From our family to yours.

Happy Birthday!

Two years have passed by in the blink of an eye. It's hard to even imagine life before you were here. We wake up and thank God every day for the blessing that you are. Thank you for opening our eyes and filling our hearts full of joy. On this, your second birthday, I say a prayer that your life is as happy as you've made ours!

Love,

Daddy