Finally, Cooking with Oil!

Not in a literal sense, of course! Cooking with oil scares the bejesus out of me!

Since we are more focused after our month-long break, we are multi-tasking to at least give ourselves a sense of some things being accomplished, because the list of unfinished items still seems a bit endless…

• Build out baseboards around the perimeter and install (we are making them ourselves.)

• Build out the pantry wall, trimmed to look like built ins, secure everything to the wall, then caulk, prime, and paint the whole blasted thing.

• Prime, at least twice, the entire island board and batten base, all the moulding, and then paint the whole kit and caboodle.

• Scribe all spaces around the counters for a more finished look.

• Tear down refrigerator wall cabinets and realign so they do not give me a migraine every time I look at ’em. (This is one task we are not looking forward to.)

Fix the open shelving in the kitchen. We still haven’t come up with a finished solution, but we did come up with something that works for us in the meantime. We have put small black hex caps around the posts that will eventually slide into the shelves. For now, they hold the shelves up from underneath.

• Complete a mile-long punch list of small tasks like changing out some lighting, touching up some paint, scraping paint droplets off the floor, etc.

We decided to start on the job we knew would take the most time and have the biggest impact. (It has already, in fact, taken forever and a day because all the nail holes had to be filled, each square had to be caulked, and everything sanded before we would be able to commence Operation Prime and Paint the Island. The hope is that it will motivate us to get the damn kitchen done, already.

With the caulking and sanding behind us, we got started priming the first coat. We are going to add a second coat to this baby, just simply because we don’t trust the bare drywall not to bleed through.

These photos are from the first coat. We will lightly sand the whole thing one more time, give it a second coat of primer, a second light sanding, all before applying color and painting the baseboards.

One other small project we have behind us is the window shelf. The window is located in a tiny cubby, about a foot deep. We didn’t want to cover the window because we want the light in that dark corner of the kitchen, so we thought it might be nice to have a shelf that I could grow herbs on.