Kitchen renovations

I've been meaning to post thoughts and pictures of the progress of our kitchen renovations, which started on Monday, February 25, the day after we got back from New York after my grandfather's funeral. I made sure to take the pictures mostly every step of the way, but haven't yet quite gotten around to actually uploading them. They will come soon, I promise.

In any event, here's some narrative:
Some of you know that we've been planning on renovating the kitchen since we moved in last year. The kitchen was quite old (~25 years) and hadn't been updated since the condo was originally built. It's a classic L-shaped kitchen, with a wall on the other side. There were a few issues with this:

1. There were only 2 drawers in the entire kitchen. Any normal kitchen should have more than two drawers; otherwise you end up wasting counter space for nick-knacks, other utensils, etc.
2. Cabinets didn't maximize the actual space of the kitchen. With at least two sets of everything, we need as much storage space as possible. Thus is the life of kosher.
3. My baking sheets did not fit into the wall oven. 'Nuf said.
4. The wall on the other side of the kitchen was empty. It could be used for more storage!

So we thought about it for a while, and with one of us not having a job at that point, we couldn't really pull the trigger on any work yet, so thinking time was good. During the 9 months between when we moved in and when we decided to get our butts in gear, we decided (with the help of a mom or two) to knock down the wall on the other side of the kitchen and expand. What's on the other side of the wall, you ask? None other than a 1/2 bath. In a one-floor, 2-bedroom condo, is a 1/2 bath really necessary? Especially with the second full bathroom off the hallway and easily accessible to guests? It's a nice luxury, but an even nicer luxury is a larger kitchen. :)

We spent a whole bunch of time visiting kitchen renovation people, and once we decided they were outside of our budget, we visited Home Depot and Lowes, who offer free design services, and the cabinet lines they sell are pretty good. We decided to go with Home Depot, which ended up being a bit cheaper than Lowes on the cabinets, and we found our own contractor, Oscar, who happens to be terrific (If you live in the DC area and need one, please don't hesitate to contact me for his info; he needs referrals to get back to school and he does excellent work!).

Work started in earnest on Monday, February 25th. Oscar knocked down the wall and started priming the kitchen for a full gutting. Our appliances were delivered ON THE DAY THEY PROMISED, Monday, March 3, and our cabinets also were delivered ON THE DAY THEY PROMISED, Thursday, March 6. Oscar started installing the cabinets this passed Monday and hopefully by tomorrow, 90% of the kitchen will be complete!

We spent a good chunk of the first week packing up the kitchen in preparations for the total gutting. Everything- food, dishes, utensils, gadgets, etc.- were packed into boxes and moved into the living and our bedroom. Oscar spent that week tearing up the floor- you'd think that removing a floor would be easy. Nope. Turns out the floor wasn't tiled, but instead was a thick sheet of marble that they cut lines into to make it look like tile, which forced Oscar to buy a jackhammer to pry it all off. The jackhammer then caused more dust than we anticipated, which got sucked into the ventilation, and spread throughout the apartment. This didn't make me happy, but what choice did we have? Though it turns out I'm kinda allergic to this stuff and it has caused major throat irritation for the last two weeks. Not fun.

Then the appliances and cabinets came. In anticipation, we moved everything in the living area to the far side of the room. Little did we know that the all the cabinets would come in 50 million boxes. No joke. OK, maybe not 50 million, but there were A LOT of boxes. So many boxes, that they took up THE ENTIRE ROOM. I have pictures to prove it. We were forced to live in our bedroom for the last week, with no entertainment but our laptops, some books, and each other. We've taken to watch the previous night's Daily Show and Colbert online to sorta make it seem like we can watch some TV.

So far, though, there are no regrets. Yes, we've had a bunch of little things come up, like marble floor, trying to move the water line for the sink to the corner and discovering a building pipe in the way, finding out that the pantry gets in the way of vent on the ceiling, etc. But, so far at least, things are going relatively well, and I'll be pleased if we move back in by next week. (And now that I'm making all this public, watch something happen to totally screw us over...) I'll also be pleased to have my living room back so that I don't have to eat and work on my bed. But even more so, I'll be happy to stop going to Home Depot every other night.

Pictures will be forthcoming, I promise.