I'm the worst

In case you are wondering, oh 5 people who read my blog, I have not given up nor have I disappeared into thin air. I’m still here, chasing away skunks and raging against the dog hair machine known as Rudi.

I have, however, been incredibly busy. My social butterfly husband and I were invited to nine, yes NINE, weddings this summer. Six of the nine were held in consecutive weekends and three of those consecutive weeks involved Adam wearing a tuxedo in the bridal party. There has not been much spare time for blog writing nor toilet cleaning. We have two more weddings in August and then we are finished until next summer’s bonanza begins in June. I welcome this hiatus with open arms.

Aside from spending large quantities of cash on tuxedo rentals, wedding gifts and hotel rooms, I have managed to conquer a project close to my heart. It seems to be close to my now aching lower back, too. It’s a little thing I like to call Cabinet Project ’08. This project, like many we have tackled in the past year, was much more complicated in reality than in concept. I’m on the cusp of reaching the light at the end of the tunnel, though I will admit it was a long and painful journey to the tunnel’s end.

As I colorfully described in a previous post, the past year has entailed a mental battle on my love/hate relationship with our oak kitchen cabinets. They were high quality, but they simply were not my style. I’m not a “really grainy late 80’s early 90’s oak kitchen cabinets and white laminate countertops” kind of girl. I might live in the country, but the country does not live in my house. It would probably smell like skunks if it did. I’m fairly picky and frankly quite choosy, and the cabinets weren’t cutting it for me. After living in their presence for a year, it was time to say goodbye. I submitted my 5 vacation days and began purchasing the necessary supplies to create my dreamy new kitchen.

The project began to rear its difficult head when I started Sunday evening with removing all of the doors. Seems easy, simple even. Then, I began counting and realized that our kitchen has 29 doors and 11 drawers. It took roughly 2 hours to remove every door, each door hinge and every handle. I had a serious talk with my hands afterwards, and they decided not to fall into the dark depths of carpel tunnel.

While I lugged each of the doors into the garage for a proper sanding, priming and some cussing, Adam spent some good bonding time with the air nailer and miter saw to add new trim to the tops and bottoms, affix panels of bead board to the sides and finish out the cabinet bottoms with sheets of oak. We spent roughly 4 days time on this portion of the project before moving on to door painting (3 coats on each side) and later to painting the cabinet boxes (2 coats of paint, 3 coats of polyurethane). I’m pretty sure I’ve never worked this hard on anything in my life. I can’t think of an occasion where I willingly worked 10 hour days for 7 days straight to achieve a goal.

Though it’s only been a few weeks since we completed our large undertaking, I’ve already begun to forget what the cabinets looked like before. I sometimes catch myself staring lovingly at the “new” cabinets, taking in their non-oak color.

Fast forward 3 weeks, and we’re just now getting around to putting the cabinet doors and drawer fronts on, after a slight debacle with the hinges. But imagine my frustration when I came the following realization: the freshly painted cabinets are the same color as the walls in our large kitchen/dining/living combo room. You know, the one that is over 400 square feet and we once referred to as “the room that will be a pain in the butt to paint someday.” One great project deserves another, right?