Here’s a photo of the south wall. We’re looking to add a little color in the form of a rug and/or backsplash. It turned out a little black and white but we’ll fix that. Also the flash on my camera kind of bleached things out a bit.

Did you forget what the before photo looked like?

Before photo of south wall.

Here’s our breakfast corner. Jerry had a great idea to build a wall to separate the fridge from this corner and I think it worked out great. The fridge used to be in this corner. Look how much counter space we opened up by moving the fridge.

Here’s a photo down the counter of the same area.

Here’s a shot of the new sink. I kept the faucet that we had as it went well with the overall design.

Our sink is so deep you can hear an echo. 9.75″ profound.

Here’s a photo of the stove side. I love the ease with which I can get to the microwave. No bending down!

Before photo of same side of the room where stove now is.

Here’s one of Jerry’s details. He put a vent in the toe-kick and funneled the old register through it. Nice touch!

A view of the other side of the sink. Look at that miles and miles of counter space! It never ends.

And finally here’s the refrigerator peninsula complete with counter-space for opening bottles of wine!

And the before shot of this same area.

Here’s the before pic at a different angle of that same wall and corner where the fridge used to be. Pretty stark change, huh?

A big thanks to Jerry and Alastair for all their hard work!

We’re coming close to the end of the Ikea Kitchen Remodel. We did some clean up over the weekend. Prior to a kitchen remodel, you may want to just remove your blinds or wrap them in plastic. Granted, not all of this dust is attributable to the kitchen remodel but whoa, what a mess! With new white cabinets, our white appliances and white blinds needed a thorough cleaning.

Other things to consider before a kitchen remodel:

- If you are keeping your appliances or if the new ones have arrived, move them to another room during the remodel. They stay much cleaner.

- An air purifier may come in handy for all the dust that is generated during a remodel.

- Keep the dust contained by shutting off other rooms.

We picked out some knobs and handles for our Ikea Kitchen Cabinets and after the toe kicks went in, it was time for the hardware installation. Here’s Al getting dirty!

Here’s a photo of some of the handles and knobs on the cabinets.

Here’s a photo of one side of the kitchen complete with pulls.

Stove-side with pulls.

Here’s a nice photo of most of the kitchen remodel complete with lighting.

You’ll notice here that we had to place the handle a little lower on these pull-out units. They are anchored at the bottom so work with that low center of gravity and not against it.

It’s all in the details. Jerry hit the registers with some spray paint to make them look new. Here’s the old vs. the new. The countertops are supposed to make their way in tomorrow!

Here’s the latest on the Ikea Kitchen Renovation. Jerry and ALISTAIR came up with this little workaround for the register vent. The cabinet will be sitting on top of it so they fashioned a means of redirecting the air flow out of the vent. They will add a vent to the toe-kick to finish the job. Not a bad little workaround, huh?

Upon further examination, it appears that they have added their personal touch to the vent deflector.

Here’s the corner of the kitchen with all the cabinets in place.

We’re getting there. Just need to add some doors, shelves and countertops among other things.

Another shot of the corner.

Alistair has added the doors and shelves to the Ikea cabinets. Progress is being made!

Hey, and we’ve added some glasses and dishes as well. Never mind our old sink. It’s just serving temporary duty and will soon be gone.

I probably ought to assemble a punch-out list since we’re getting close:

vent cover;
replace porch light;
basement ceiling – 2 spots;
window frame;
quarter-round;
knobs and handles;
remaining shelving;
dishwasher screws;
return extra flooring;
align doors;
outlet covers;
and I’m sure there’s more.

Hey, we added a new recessed light above the sink, and it’s on a switch instead of a chain pull! Oh yeah!

Mud – coat 2

More mud – second coat.

Ok, we’ve got some drywall to finish up. Here’s Jerry working on the corners.

Here’s Jerry pointing to the edge. I’ll let him add more later.

And we are starting to mud the walls.

Another shot of Jerry’s handiwork.

And we’ve got one coat of mud up. Get the air circulating and turn the heat up. We are officially on DRY time! Also notice that the light fixtures are gone.

We showed up at Ikea this morning a little before 11 am. Here’s Jerry fiddling with the kitchen design at Ikea’s kitchen planning station. For some reason, Ikea just can’t take your order that you’ve created at the kitchen planning station. They have to input the order again into their computers. This took about 40 minutes for them to do. The fun begins.

I should back up. We had to return the Tundra Maple Flooring first. I was getting some attitude from the return lady. One of the flooring packages had opened slightly somewhere in the midst of its loading, unloading, reloading, and unloading again. This slight tear in the plastic set her off and she became the return lady nazi. I exaggerate a bit but for a moment I thought I wasn’t going to be able to return a pack of crappy flooring. From there we headed up to the kitchen department.

After waiting for the Ikea help to enter our kitchen order, we paid for it and headed down to the furniture pickup zone (right next to returns). We were told that Ikea coworkers would get the order ready and that we were to watch the tv screen for 67400 to flash up letting us know our order was ready for pickup. This was told to us by some dude in a bunny suit. We were given an estimate of one hour.

So we watched the blue tv screen.

And sat on the couch and waited.

And went outside and smoked and waited.

And took pics of Ikea and waited. Finally, someone approached us to let us know that our order had been ready for the last half hour. Turns out Mr. Bunny Suit gave us the wrong number as 67400 never came up on the screen. But 67300 did come up on the screen. That was total Ikea bullshit.

At least they helped up load it up fairly quickly.

And here’s our truckload of cabinets, etc.

I didn’t get a before shot of this but we removed the cookie monster blue carpeting from the stairs. Although not kitchen related, it was ripe for the pickins.

Here we’ve added some drywall and moved some outlets.

Here’s another angle. The fridge is going into this location along with a 36″ floor and wall cabinet.

Another shot of drywall.

Here’s Uncle Jerry working on a transition strip. Check out that hat!

Here’s the finished product.

El piso es almost finito. Here are some shots. Y no es mojado.

Floor should be finished tomorrow.

Here are some shots of the new floor installation. It’s going a lot smoother with the floor from Lowe’s. We had to ditch the Ikea floor. Overall, this is a better floor choice than the Tundra Maple from Ikea which would have probably been too light. This flooring is oak and made by Pergo.

Don’t be fooled by the pieces of flooring laying on top of the floor. This floor is going together very nicely.

Again, that’s a spare piece of flooring on top of the floor so don’t be fooled by it.