Countertops!

This summer has been about as garbage as a summer can possibly be for me. Instead of doing things that summer is known for like relaxing, having fun, and going on vacation, we've spent the whole summer working on our house with every available moment of free time.

I told y'all about the stuff we did to get our damaged floors redone. The new floors were in a month and a half ago, and since that day, the work hasn't even paused. Instead, it moved to a new focus. Now we're trying to get our kitchen put back together.

It looked like this when I did that post back in mid-July:

And we've lived with this ever since, as we steadily added to it, assembling Ikea cabinets, mounting them, painting the door front, etc. We've had no countertops, no oven, no stove, and no sink this whole time. At least we were able to keep the refrigerator going.

It's been a monstrous pain in the ass, and I have to say that there is no way the finished product can be worth what it took to get there. My wife would probably disagree, which is a little weird since she has done more of the work on it than I have, but she really cares about shit like kitchens and floors. This was what she wanted in the first place, so I suppose she will be happy when it's all done.

We worked on the kitchen every weekend this summer, and it went from what you see above to this:

 Then to this:

When it was mostly assembled, my wife started painting all the doors to the color she had chosen. And the kitchen looked like this:

The doors had to dry inside the house for the most part, because the humidity of Houston made it impossible for the enamel to harden completely otherwise. Of course, it also has been raining every few minutes here as well, which makes it tough for paint to dry.

With some doors painted, she started putting them on, and our kitchen began to look like a real kitchen.

Now that it was looking like we were close, my wife decided it was time to order the countertops and get the installation appointment set up. It was set for yesterday...which gave us a deadline. We had to have everything ready for the countertops to be installed. Worse yet...well for her, not so much for me...I was scheduled to work the two Saturdays leading up to the installation, so I was only going to be around to help for half of the weekends we had available.

We struggled out way through it. If you've ever done home renovation, then you know that nothing works like it should, and everything takes at least twice as long as you expect, and each problem you solve actually causes two more problems you have to deal with. But yesterday morning, we had it as ready as we could get it.

The installation guys didn't even show up until after noon. They had scheduled to be here for two days to put all the countertops in, but instead, they just worked non-stop until 9:30 at night. By the end of the day, we had new countertops, and our kitchen really did feel like a kitchen.

It's pretty amazing to have a stove cooktop right there available for use.

And look at this amazing thing. It's a sink!

Don't get too excited, it's not hooked up. It still can't be used. Tomorrow, a plumber is coming to hook up the sinks. That will be a red letter day for sure.

The bar got extended, so it can be used as a place to sit and eat at if wanted, instead of just a place to pile crap and make a big mess.

Since we'd already paid for the slabs for the kitchen, there was enough left over to get our bathroom countertops too. So those were replaced with the quartz that my wife picked as well.

As you can probably tell, the sinks there aren't hooked up yet either. We are without any sinks on the entire main floor right now. We have to use the bathtub in the master bathroom to get any water or wash any dishes right now. Hopefully everything will go well when the plumber comes tomorrow, and we won't have to deal with that much longer. I'm tired of living like it's 1900 before indoor plumbing became a thing.

So, that's where we are. There's still a lot to go. The vent over the stove is something that we are going to have to build from scratch. There's several cover panels that need to be put in place to fill in gaps, gotta bring in the dishwasher and hook it back up, get the new oven mounted and hooked up, and stuff like that.

It'll probably be well into the fall if not past the winter solstice when we finally finish all of this shit, but at least it's starting to feel like we're over the hump and onto the downhill slope.

My wife has complained about how this year has felt like we haven't done anything fun. We did go to Disneyworld in February, but after the summer we had it feel like a distant memory, like we actually went there in February of 2018 instead of February of this year. I have to agree.

The real problem isn't that we haven't done anything fun, it's actually that we haven't done anything normal. We spend all our free time on the kitchen, which means our kids get none of our free time, and our family is suffering because of it. Hopefully, we'll be back to normal soon, and we can do things like watch movies on a Sunday afternoon with our children, and let them see that we still love them and think about them sometimes.

All I can say is that if you are thinking of re-doing your kitchen, save up enough money that you can pay someone to do it for you, and get it done in a week or two. Using every moment of your free time for months on end is no way to live, and no kitchen, no matter how fancy it turns out, is worth that price.