After I published my last post on this blog, I thought I'd wait a few days and let you all build up the anticipation of "the big reveal." You know, placing the "before" and "after" pics of the kitchen so you could go ooh and ahh at the perfection of everything. But the days turned into weeks, and suddenly I'm looking at my blog saying
Bloody Mary, it's been that long since I've written?!
There were illnesses. There were complications. There were papers to grade. All that is behind me now (well, I'll
always have more papers to grade, but I've managed the flow). So here are some updated pics. I'll show the before and after pictures in all their glory in the next post. Cross your fingers it will be this month.
I'll start out with the backsplash tiles. These little slate beauties called out to me at The Home Depot:
buy us! they sang out to me,
we're so lovely! we look so European! So I did. But between the time I laid the floor tiles and the backsplash tiles, we had a few days that we Texans call Sent By The Grace Of God, otherwise known as Snow Days. And on one of these particularly icy days, the garage door decided to open back up and witness the entire frigid night itself. As if it didn't quite believe what all the fuss was about. I discovered too late 1) that everything in the garage was "nigh to freezing" and 2) what a good, hard freeze does to premixed grout: it stinks to high heaven and dries like a witch's broomstick.
So what if the grout stinks, I thought. So what if there's a milky white layer on top of the gray mud. What harm can it do? So I used that post-freeze grout between the tiles. The next day, all my pretty slate tiles morphed into some god-awful concrete-y sight:
After some advice from my long-suffering partner (he suggested vinegar, I scoffed at him, then had to apologize when I discovered vinegar worked like a charm), the cleaned tiles looked like this:
And here's the rest of the kitchen so far:
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| one wall cabinet up.... |
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| two islands are better than one |
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| mood lights beneath the cabinets. must paint the cord covers. both cabinets up! |
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| the maiden voyage post electrical hookup |
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| our view from our breakfast table |
A VentaHood is still in the delivery process, and we have a few more things to do to yet, but you can see where we're headed.
I'm looking forward to a Girl's Night Out in my new kitchen. Lovely ladies, I'll be contacting you soon.
