Day Nine

My cabinet excitement may have been premature.

I came home to some obvious headway in the kitchen, but not in the direction that I had anticipated.  I spoke to the contractor on Thursday, and he told me to schedule my granite template for Wednesday--so I did.  But the cabinets aren't up.  And I may be panicking a little.

You see, the thing about granite is it takes time.  Once they do the template, they have to cut the stone and do all of this other stuff (magic?), and then put it in.  My contractor said it can take up to three weeks.  That's three weeks without my fully-functioning kitchen.  Three weeks of doing the dishes in the bathroom.

I may be exaggerating.  The appliances are here.  I had no idea that this was happening.  None.

When we started this project, the husband and I decided to go big with it and go for the new appliances.  It didn't make sense to put the old appliances in our shiny, newly renovated kitchen.  So those are there.  Taking up room.  We will survive.  (Really, I just can't wait until they're hooked up and I can use them.)

Nothing happened today in the bedroom, but there were developments in the kitchen.

The wall is all taped and sanded.  The ceiling has been taped and there's holes for lights!

The pantry is all rocked and taped.

This is the view from the bathroom hallway.  Look at all the outlets!  Look, I have lights in the ceiling!

We also did a little bit more work this weekend.  We're in somewhat of a holding pattern--not sure what we can to that won't be undone by construction or what we can finish without making the lives of the crew difficult.  It's a tough spot to be in.

The old lights in the bathroom were very dated.  It took me a couple of tries to unscrew the light bulb from them because they were so old. The husband and I picked out some new ones and he installed them yesterday.

The new lights are really bright too, which is a plus.  They're a little modern, but small enough to fit in just fine.

Picking out paint has been an adventure.  I have something in mind, a grayscale vision, but finding the right paint hadn't happened yet.  Swatches give you an idea of what it will look like, but until you get the paint on the wall, it is almost impossible to know what the final color will be.  (Case and point--the bathroom paint, which does not appear how I'd imagined.)  I've been looking at swatches for months, and once I had it narrowed down, I picked up some samples.  I painted strategic areas to see the color with the floor and the lighting.  The first two were just not right.  The next two are better, and I think one is the color, but I need to see it against the cabinets to know.

This is what the wall looks like now:

The photos don't show a huge difference between the shades, but there's four different colors.  The forerunner is in the right photo, on the left.  I won't have a better idea until the cabinets go up.  The lighter gray looked almost white at first, but dries a bit darker.  We're on the fence.