Cone-head

Moz had a little procedure yesterday and is sporting this for the next week. He hates it. Poor guy.

Alfalfa

Mozzi has bad bed head when he wakes up. His fur looks crazy and is going every which way. After some running around and petting it settles down EXCEPT for this one little piece of rogue fur on the back of his head that sticks straight up all the time. It's my favorite. How can you ever be mad at that face?!

What We've Been Up To

Why hello there.

So my grandiose plans of starting this blog to keep you all up to date with progress pictures, how-to's, our successes and our failures during our kitchen renovation is well, an epic fail.

The past 3 months have been busy. We kept truckin on the kitchen reno and we are starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel! As of today, we have a fully functional kitchen! Everything is back in the cabinets and drawers, all of our appliances have been moved back in and we've even started cooking again! The only things left on our to-do list are to (1) move in the concrete counters from the garage and seal them (2) install the backsplash and (3) trim out the doors and window. I figured since we're pretty close to being done, I'll save the pictures for our big reveal!

We don't have many progress pictures anyway because we've been pre-occupied taking pictures of this guy.

Say hello to the newest member of our family!

Mozzi

(8 weeks old)

So as I mentioned in our first ever post, our reward for finishing the kitchen was a puppy! Well, this little guy came a little early. We weren't planning on getting a puppy so soon but just look at that face. How can you say no to him! He's an F2b labradoodle and came home with us in mid-December.

Mozzi (moz-ee) is named after a character on a TV show called White Collar on USA. If yall haven't seen it, you need to. Some people have called him Moh-zee mistakenly. Honestly, we didn't know how to spell his name and we were too lazy to look it up so we just made up the spelling. I looked on the TV show credits later and it's actually spelled Mozzie. We never changed it because by then we had already made his ID tag and filled out the paperwork at the vet. Oh wells. Mozzi is how the cool kids spell it.

He's a huge fluff ball (that doesn't shed!) of clumsy goofy puppy and we love him to death. He's already 16 weeks old now and is growing so fast! We expect him to be about 45 pounds. So yeah, this guy has been keeping us busy. More gratuitous puppy photos to come!

Update

It's been over a month since my last update and let me be frank and tell you why. We are exhausted. We work all day and then come home and work on the kitchen a few hours each night and on the weekends. It's mentally and physically draining. We're going on 5+ months under construction and the last thing I want to do is sit down and re-hash everything and sort through tons of pictures to post.

So in short, I'm sorry.

It's me, not you.

Here's a quick update (sans pics, sorry still tired) of what we've accomplished so far.

• Drywall has been tape, floated, and textured
• Walls and cabinets have been painted (only cabinet doors and drawer fronts left to paint)
• Hinges and slides for drawers and doors have been installed
• Recessed lighting has been installed
• Under cabinet lighting installed
• Concrete counters have been poured and taken out of the molds. We're having some uneven color issues we're working to resolve before we bring them into the house.

We've made a lot of progress but we still have a ways to go. It doesn't help that the holiday season is about to kick into full gear which is always crazy busy.

Back to it....

Opening Things Up

We finally finished all the demo! We saved demolishing this pass-through wall last to keep the dust and other nasty stuff out of our den for as long as possible. First, we checked that this wall was not a load bearing wall. So let me refresh your memory of our original plan. 

- Remove the column between the window and the pocket door (yes, having a window there defeats the purpose of having a pocket door. Another one of the previous owner/carpenter, Bob's, great ideas)

- Keep the bottom half of the wall because it provides much needed storage on the kitchen side  

- Push the left side of the old window to the left about a foot

- Push the top of it up to match the height of the doorway

- Keep the right side of the wall as is

We're a little over zealous when it comes to demo and we usually end up tearing out more than planned. We had to completely tear out the right side of the wall in order to remove the pocket door. Really that entire wall didn't have much framing at all. At this point we had this convo.

Jon: Hmm, I really like how open it looks. Maybe we shouldn't frame back the right side of the wall.

Me: Let's not make any quick decisions. Let's just stare at it for a week, talk to Phu about what we can do and then decide.

So we stared and stared at the nothingness...

And decided to keep things open and not frame up the right side of the wall again. It makes it feel almost like a great room. We built back up the half wall with the cabinets on the kitchen side and put up a header across the top.

Here's a shot from the kitchen side. The cabinets were previously 12" deep and we built new ones at 16" deep for two reasons. (1) the old 12" deep cabinets were too shallow for lower cabinets and didn't provide enough storage (2) I asked Phu to build a little desk on the far right end so we'd have a dedicated space to pay bills, sort mail, keep cookbooks, etc. Twelve inches for a desk wouldn't have been deep enough for my laptop and writing space.

Sheetrock Or Drywall?

That is the question. Not really. I've just heard it called many different things. I've been calling it sheetrock and wanted to see if I was calling it the correct name. So I did quick google search and turns out that drywall or gypsum board is the generic name for it. And if you're super cool and with the in crowd you can just call it "rock". Sheetrock is actually a brand of drywall. We didn't buy Sheetrock and we're not that cool so I guess I'll just call it drywall from now on.

Anyway, we wanted to save some moolah and decided to put up our own drywall. How hard could it be right? Famous. Last. Words.

The actual fastening it to the wall studs wasn't difficult. It was cutting it exactly right to fit. The biggest obstacles for us were lots of electrical boxes, oddly shaped holes in the ceiling where we had to rip out the old drywall, and the fact that the walls in our old home aren't square.

I won't go into too much detail about how to hang drywall in general. We learned about it from our friends at This Old House! This step-by-step was really helpful (http://www.thisoldhouse.com/toh/how-to/intro/0,,217215,00.html). My hyperlink thing still isn't working in Blogger so you'll have to copy/paste the URL. Anyone have any idea how to troubleshoot that? Sorry, technical difficulties. Moving on.

We purchased 4' x 8' drywall from Home Depot and used a box cutter to cut the pieces down to size where needed. You can cut through the paper on one side and then just snap the board on your line. Then just cut through the paper on the other side of the board. Easy peasy.

We used 1 5/8" drywall screws to attach it to the wall studs. An impact drill makes this process go a lot faster and makes it easier to countersink the screws (i.e. drive them slightly below the surface of the drywall to cover them up later with drywall mud). However, if you're screwing in the corners, sometimes the impact drill caused the drywall to crack which isn't good. It happened to us quite a few times. We learned just to use a regular drill for the corner screws.

So in case you guys ever decide to put up your own drywall, I wanted to share our trick for cutting around electrical boxes since that is more likely a common issue than the wonky walls and oddly shaped holes in the ceiling.

Once you've cut your drywall to size, follow these steps to cut around electrical boxes and get it right on the first try every time.

1. Grab some bright nail polish.

 2. Paint the corners of the electrical box with the nail polish. 

 

3. Line up your piece of drywall in the correct position and press the backside against the electrical box. You'll get an impression of the corners of the box. 

  

4. Connect the dots, grab your jab saw, and have at it.  

  

5. Fits like a glove. Attach your drywall to the wall studs as usual. 

Additional helpful tips:

- Each drywall board is marked with small x's. The x side should be the side that you see.
- Buy a jab saw! It's totally worth the 5 bucks. Doesn't have to be anything fancy but it will make the process a hundred times easier.
- Make straight cuts (i.e. use a T square) as best you can because if your first cut isn't straight, then cutting the piece that goes next to it will be difficult. You'll likely end up going through the process of cut, test fit, take down, trim, test fit again, curse words, take down, trim some more, and repeat. It's a pain in the butt. Save yourself some time.
- Drywall dust gets everywhere and is hard to vaccuum up. Buy those cheap plastic covers for painting and cover what you don't want to get dusty.

We decided to hire professionals to tape, float, and texture the drywall. That is beyond the DIY comfort zone for us newbies. We're also hoping the professionals can hide some of our mistakes learning curve in hanging the drywall.

Another Year Older

It was my birthday a few days ago. I came home from work to this. 

My favorite cupcakes. Red velvet and chocolate with vanilla frosting. yum. 

AAAAND THIS!!!!!

My hubby is the best!!!

 What? Every girl doesn't want a miter saw for her birthday? Not even a double-bevel sliding one?!

 I may or may not have dropped a couple of hints. The wheels are already turning for my next project if we ever after we finish the kitchen.

Jon even made sure to tell me he got it on sale for about 30% off, which makes it even better!

I do love me a good deal. He knows me so well :)