The only thing really left to do is touching up paint and sealing the tiles on the wall.  So here are the long awaited pictures.  I am happier than I thought I would be with the outcome.  I mean, I knew it would be an improvement, but it turned out better than I could have hoped.

I know its been a while since I have updated, and with good reason, I promise.  We went out of town for the 4th of July, to my grandparents house.  They live on a lake and the fireworks are pretty nice to watch, and they have one of the best views.  Sadly, it was thunderstorming and they postponed the fireworks until the next week.  So I didn’t get to see any live fireworks this year.  So disappointing!  And I really wanted to capture some pictures of my brother’s future daughter, Taylor, ’s face.

Ah well.

So we came home on Sunday to start tearing apart our kitchen in preparation of the cabinets coming on Monday.

Joe started ripping up the floor Sunday night, he only spent 15 minutes on it before quitting.  Just a test run for the next day.  But still got pretty far within that short amount of time.

In these pictures the cabinets are missing their drawers, but the drawers didn’t have bottoms anyway, so this is pretty representative of what we have been dealing with for a kitchen for the past 3 years.

On Monday we really went to town tearing everything out.  It was a very productive day.

I think Joe was having a lot of fun with the crow bar.

We messed up the wall a little where one of the wall cabinets was hung.  But we need to build walls around those pipes, anyway.

The next day was spent building walls, priming, and painting trim.  Also, I had a little bit of a freak out when I found out that two wall cabinets we were going to be using for base cabinets had an arched design on the top (As seen in the picture below).  The wonderful man at Lowes who helped us place the order for the cabinets called the company, and they are going to mail us replacement doors.  We can keep the other doors to do whatever we want with.

Seen in this picture: The new walls built around the pipes, the new wall color, our new cabinets, and our beautiful new dishwasher.

Below is the wall where the oven and over-the-range microwave will go.  You can see the spice drawers to the left of the oven space.  There will also be a tile backsplash on the wall behind the oven.

Right now the countertops are being installed.  We still have so much more to do.  Even before we have a working kitchen again.  Before we can have the plumber come back to install the dishwasher, the sink, and the toilet in the attached bathroom, we need to lay the tile.  Which is going to be one of the longest tasks in the entire project.

Also, the subflooring for the tile makes me rather itchy.  I break out in a rash every time I touch it.  So that should be interesting.

But everything is so exciting.  There isn’t a ton more to do - just odds and ends, and the tiles, of course.