Working on the Kitchen

We took the bed out of storage and put it in the Master bedroom, it was more firm than we thought, so we put a memory foam topper on it.  It was nice to be able to get out of bed normally again, but we decided to needed a new bed for the guest room anyway...so Crew went into town and got one when we knew Mark was coming out to help us with our plumbing situations.  So, now we put the newer softer bed in the Master and the much firmer bed in the guest room for Mark (my surrogate son).  Mark is actually my youngest son Mitchell's best friend since Middle School?  There was a time when he stayed with us for awhile, so basically he is like my son and I love him to pieces for all he has done to help us.

We wanted to change the layout of the kitchen in the country house to get rid of the Peninsula and add some pot drawers.  We needed new countertops and had been looking around trying to find something we liked that didn't cost an arm and a leg...that was not laminate. We did consider granite or some other type of stone.  We looked at a number of cabinet options and gourmet appliances, but we didn't want to move appliances when they put in the floor, so we didn't purchase them.  We got quotes and delivery estimates from Dallas to the country house.

I told you before that we had to settle on some things...we had figured our taxes by this time and got the shock of our lives, we owed a ton of money, they did not withhold all of the taxes we requested when we cashed in our stocks and IRA's and because Crew had worked half the year our tax bracket was higher than we thought!  We cancelled the movers, we bought cabinets and assembled them ourselves, we went with butcher block countertops from Lumber Liquidators in the kitchen, we decided we should spend a whole lot less on appliances and completely skip remodeling the bathrooms, after all they were functional.  We had to start charging everything to the credit card and hope we made enough off the sale of our house in Dallas to pay the bills off.

In the kitchen, we pulled the countertop off of the peninsula section of the cabinets and straightened the cabinets to get an idea of what we needed in the way of cabinetry.  We put some attic decking on top of the counter so we could still use the counter for our camp stove.  I got on line and started shopping for bargains, we needed a kitchen sink, countertops and the cabinets, we also needed lighting and an island as cheap as I could find them...and free delivery would be great!  Too bad the free delivery didn't happen on the heaviest items, but...we were still driving back and forth to Dallas, so we picked up the cabinets when they came in and we picked up the countertops in Shreveport.  Shreveport was only 53 miles from the house and since the countertops were 12 feet long and weighed 100 lbs each we thought it would be safer to pick them up closer to the house.  We had to get the countertops and sink so Mark could get the sink plumbed while he was out at the country house!  In the mean time he was working his rear end off trying to get other plumbing issues repaired, and there were plenty.

Because we had the carpet installed, we now had some carpet padding and leftover pieces of carpet that we used in the living room and kitchen. We had moved a patio bistro table and chairs to the house for something to sit on and I had ordered a couple of reclining patio lounge chairs to sit on because by this time we were hurting bad from standing on concrete for long periods of time. My husband and I are over 50, your body parts don't hold up as well after you turn 50...especially lifting heavy items and working 12 plus hours a day.

Kitchen in progress 

The Kitchen Before