I haven’t had a lot of time to mess with the cabinets, but they seem to be pretty easy to install so far. We’ve got 3/7 of the wall cabinets installed, and the rest should be done sunday. I have a big important beer pong tournament tomorrow, so I’m not sure anything will get done. Anyway, I spent a summer unloading cabinets off trucks at construction sites, and I got to see a lot of installer technique, and it looked pretty tricky. They used to build these little machines out of an old car jack with a box mounted around it, in order to hold up the wall cabinets at a level position while they screwed them in. Ikea has a tight system where you mount a metal rail on the wall first, then just “hang” the cabinets from it. That way you don’t have to manhandle a big heavy cabinet while you are trying to get it perfectly level. I had to cut a couple side panels tonight and I was gonna use my dad’s table saw, but it chipped up the first board pretty bad (luckily it won’t be visible in the installation). I ended up going over to his neighbor’s house and using his fancy laser miter saw. Anyway, here are some pictures that are a few days old:

Mike screws in a wall rail:

..and the cabinets are hung. There is an end panel on the left side now (it wasn’t there in the pic), so the white surface isn’t exposed anymore:

An army of base cabinets awaits installation:

The painting was completed last night, except for a couple touch up items. Today after work, Bob and I reviewed the cabinet plans. Then, I went to my parents’ and borrowed the van and took the seats out. Mike and I went to Ikea and put in the order. We left for Ikea around 7:30, and the van was fully loaded to the brim with cabinets by 9:30. They were running a deal where you get a $250 gift certficate with $2500+ in purchases, so that pretty much knocked out the sales tax, which was pretty awesome. The whole cabinet configuration ended up just under 3k, although I haven’t decided on/bought the handles yet. We stopped by QT then headed to the condo to unload. By about 10:30, everything was unloaded into the garage and we decided to call it quits. Tomorrow, we start building/installing. I’m a little worried about the two rows of cabinets that are angled. Cutting the countertops to match perfectly is going to be very tricky. Aside from that, it shouldn’t be too bad.

Today I finished the closets and put the first coat on in the kitchen. We figured out the mysterious paint color problem, and it looks like the Home Depot on Ray messed up the original batch of the color. My dad took it over there and made them match the original bad color, so I think we just need to use that to do some touchups and we should be set. I think we should be able to wrap up the major painting tomorrow, and there will just be really minor touchup stuff left. Here are some pics of the gutted kitchen:

And here’s one of the stairway that was a real pain to paint:

Today I ripped out more cabinets and did a little painting. All of the cabinets are out except for the sink one, because I need the sink to clean paint stuff. We ran into a nasty problem…the paint color for the accent walls is not uniform. It appears that the original paint I got from Home Depot was a darker shade. I’m almost positive it was supposed to be the same color. I went back there and the guy had no idea why it was different. I had him look in the computer for the order but he couldn’t find it. I’m gonna go back with the receipt with the date/time and see what I ordered. I’m guessing the paint person maybe heard the color wrong and mixed a different one. If I can’t get the original color, I’m gonna have to repaint a whole room plus a wall. Hopefully, we can get the original color and all will be well. After we ripped out all the cabinets, my dad patched up a bunch of messed up parts of the wall with joint compound, which takes quite a while to dry. I was hoping to paint the kitchen today, but the stuff was not dry. Maybe tomorrow. I’ll post some pictures of the gutted kitchen tomorrow, and also the paint line trick worked really well, so I will post some pictures of that.

The painting is almost “complete”. Everything has the first coat except the kitchen. We won’t finish tomorrow, but we’ll be close. I am really looking forward to doing the cabinets, because they should improve the look by a lot. Here are some pics:

…and you can see here we started removing cabinets in the kitchen, the one above the fridge is gone:

The pale cabinets are so boring with the wall and appliance colors. The darker ones we’re gonna put in should make it look much more “warm”. I’m also thinking about replacing the fluorescent light in the kitchen with some recessed lighting for a more warm color, but that’s probably a ways off.

The painting is now down to the stairs, master bath, kitchen, and touchups. I think we may be done by Thursday so we can start working on cabinets this weekend. I came up with the idea to build a paint-can-a-mid, although I already threw away a bunch of cans. Here’s the start…

The bathroom will be a pain, but I already got it mostly masked. The mirror was really heavy and Mike wasn’t around today, so I was too afraid to try and move it myself. Here’s what the other bathroom looked like when masked:

Fun stuff. I was particularly proud of the masking on the toilet.

Now, all of the rooms have been painted with at least one coat except for the kitchen, stairway and one bathroom. Tonight, we can hopefully finish up a second coat on some or all of those. The stairway has some really tall parts, so I’m going to try to find this fabled “sponge on a stick” device to get the corners. The roller on a pole should be able to get most of it. In the kitchen, my attack plan is to rip out all the cabinets except the sink one before painting, so it is easy to paint. Then, once that is done, it will be time to pick up the new cabinets, which will be one of the biggest purchases so far. My plan is to do the Akurum cabinet series from Ikea with Adel medium brown finish. I’d link to them, but the site is broken right now. I need to finalize the layout before I buy those. Once the paint and cabinets are done, the tile can start, which will be exciting.

So, one of the only major decisions I have left to make is what to do with the bathrooms. Since I’m going to replace the kitchen cabinets, it would be pretty ghetto if I left the bathrooms alone. The shared bathroom would be easy; it is a standard size (37″), plus it is next to the toilet, so I could use a different sized cabinet/counter if I wanted. With that in mind, I have a wide range of options. In the master, however, there is a 71″ counter with double sinks. The standard size for a double sink counter is 61″. They have some pretty cool corian ones at home depot for under $300, but alas I cannot use them. The counter has walls on both sides, so I pretty much need to find something that is 71 inches long. That basically leaves me with two options. Tile the counter top or order a custom one for $700+. Lowes has a granite single sink custom counter for about $700. I need to get more info, but it seems like a decent deal for granite, but still lots of money. Tile would be very flexible and probably pretty cheap if I do it myself, but lots of work, and I’ve already got a lot of work on my hands. So, there you have it. I’d love to hear any other ideas or opinions on which would be better. I also have yet to shop for cabinets for the bathrooms, so I need to do that.

We keep painting and painting and it never gets done. I think all of the ceilings are done as of today, except for the living room needs a little work. I got there today pretty early, so there was a little daylight left, and I could see some spots. Once the light was gone, it was hard to tell with artificial light. I’ll have to run over there right away after work tomorrow and take care of it. I started the walls in the master bedroom, and got the first coat done. The window was a bit of a pain since there was lots of masking. Here’s a pic of what it looks like, although its hard to really get an idea of the color from this photo:

You can see the flat white ceiling, which looks pretty cool in contrast. I tried a new trick on the corners to help get sharper lines between colors. I was talking to Anbar a few weeks ago, and she had some secret technique, but I couldn’t remember what it was, so I went looking online. I found a couple things, but the easiest seemed to be this…you mask around the edge of the ceiling, then paint the ceiling color over the tape. That way the ceiling colored paint bleeds under the tape and makes a “seal”. I couldn’t remember if you were supposed to wait for it to dry, so I gave it like 2 hours, cause it seemed like the seal would work better if it dried. Then you paint the corners again with the wall color. I think this wall is going to need a second coat, so I left all the tape in place, but we should see the results tomorrow.

So that is that room, and one other room is completely done with paint, except for the closet. Here’s a couple pictures of the accent color in action:

Hopefully with the ceilings finished tomorrow, things will start moving faster. The bathrooms and kitchen could be a pretty big pain though.

After Saturday’s painting bonanza, we had most of the ceilings covered, many of them with two coats. We also got some more paint samples and switched up the main wall color to “Natural Taupe”.

Yesterday, we figured we’d get started on the walls. We went to home depot and picked up some more paint for the wall colors. Five gallons of the main color, and two gallons of accent. We wrapped up most of the second coats on the ceiling, but there are still some bad spots, so I think we will still need to add coats in some places. We’ve gone through 7 gallons of ceiling paint so far, although 2 of them went bad. Anyway, we also finished some of the accent walls. One whole room is accent color, and that has a full coat now. We’ll have to do a second coat on most of the accent walls, but they are looking good. I think I’m gonna take today off from working because I’m getting pretty sore. There are lots of new pics in the gallery.

We also looked at some cabinets at home depot…I found some nice ones and they are all right around $3k for a “sample 10×10” kitchen, which I think is a little smaller than my kitchen. That’s about $1000 more than Ikea for the sample kitchen (Ikea also includes countertops, so the difference is really bigger than that). I’m planning on going to Ikea to check on the quality of theirs this evening, but I think the home depot ones are way nicer, and I could maybe get all the cabinets I need for about $4k. They also had some cool Corian counters, but they were almost as expensive as granite.