Kitchen progress: Are you sick of this yet?

Because I sure am. I’ve been living with this renovation now since the beginning of June. It is mid-July. I’m tired of stepping in drywall dust and keeping my dishes in boxes and trying to keep impact drivers away from toddlers and I really just want my house to get back to some semblance of normal again.

Our living room has looked like this for a month. There are boxes behind the brown couch and just out of sight behind the rocking chair on the right. Stuff is piled EVERYWHERE.

Our patio is actually worse than this right now. Cardboard and demolished cabinets everywhere.

I shouldn’t complain though. We made a ton of progress over the long weekend and the photos below are already outdated. David has been busting his bum to get this thing wrapped up and I’m assembling cabinets and drawers as fast as I can to keep up with him.

He started his Independence Day by tearing out the last remaining cabinetry, which meant moving the dishwasher and taking out the kitchen sink.

That gave us plenty of room to patch drywall seams. Even in the desert, heavily applied goop (the technical term for that pink mud stuff) takes forever to dry. It’s monsoon season, though, so it’s been more humid that usual and the goop dries even slower. So there wasn’t much else to do but assemble pieces and wait.

When we put in the corner cabinet and the one that would hold the sink, we were soooo relieved to discover that the existing plumbing fit perfectly where we needed it to be. All David needed to do was cut a small hole for the dishwasher hoses.

Quick note: Ikea cabinets are really easy to assemble…except when they’re not. For example, I built the cabinet for the sink, then opened the sink box only to discover I needed to take the cabinet apart, remove some stuff and add new pieces to support the sink. If all the instructions were in one place it wouldn’t be so hard, but each box has its own set. Flat pack DIY furniture is great in some ways but tremendously infuriating in other ways.

I’ll have to devote an entire post to all the weird setbacks we’ve had to deal with along the way. It’s been a blast. *eye roll*

We had to install the countertops before we could set in the sink, so David fired up the band saw in the garage and did some quick cutting. When we went to bed Saturday night the kitchen looked like this.

Notice that the sink isn’t connected to anything? David did try to take care of that, but it didn’t come together as easily as he’d hoped We were sink-free until Monday morning when he hooked it up first thing before leaving for work. Bless that man. He takes such good care of me.

We are getting closer but there’s still a lot of work ahead of us. There are a couple more base cabinets to assemble and install before we can hang any upper cabinets. David needs to put the range hood in. The walls and ceiling need to be sanded and gooped and sanded again, and once that’s done we can paint. Our back splash tile should be here around the first of August. We haven’t even started shopping for drawer pulls and other hardware. The sconces need to be ordered–assuming we decide to get the ones I found–so those can be installed. And if we are going to do open shelves we should probably figure that out too.

So much to do. It’ll be great to show you legit after pictures but you better believe I’m plenty happy with my big gorgeous sink for now.