Kitchen Remodel - End of Week 4

It's beginning to look a lot like Kitchen....

First, though, to conclude the Saga of the Stairs: the old ones are gone gone gone. For one night we were stairless entirely. Fortunately we had plans to be out for the evening.

Good thing Sophie and the cats heeded the yellow "caution" tape. (We did put up a plywood barricade as well, as much for our welfare as for theirs.)

The new stairs are a thing of beauty, relatively speaking. I'll never take them for granted. Once we got on the right track, they were done in a day.

Nothing in this picture is really this yellow

Painting is completed, except for touchup at the end. I don't think we made a mistake with the color; we'll know more when the other big color elements -- countertop and floor -- go in.

Remember that beam dividing the full-height ceiling from the dropped portion by the big window? Here's what that stretch looks like now:

Most exciting of all, the cabinetry guys worked all day yesterday, with these results:

The cabinets are maple. Right now I'm loving the look of the wood without any hardware, but the drawer pulls will go on soon. Hopefully they'll add rather than detract.

Most of the upper cabinets have frosted glass doors. The bottom ones all pull out. No more hunting in dark, obscure corners for a colander or a funnel! No more neck-wrenching reaching for the Kitchenaid mixer!  Everything closes softly, with a final damped drawing-to that's so cool to watch. I imagine it will lose its novelty eventually.

To the right of Jerry (below) is the built-in box that will enclose the new refrigerator. We measured; it should fit. We'll lose some potential fridge magnet surface, but it does look elegant this way:

 We spec'd the right-most pantry wider than the left to accomodate the wine rack that my Dad made decades ago. It's been living downstairs, in the guest room, since we've been in this house, and that's just not right. I hope we have the discipline, when it comes to putting our kitchen back together, to take the time to break old patterns in favor of new arrangements that make more sense.

Jer and I journeyed to Tualatin this afternoon to see our quartz countertop slabs for the first time. It turned out that we needed to cut into a second slab for the counter plus the 4" backsplash we'd envisioned. Once it became clear that we had to buy two slabs anyway, we decided to go for a full-height backsplash behind the stovetop. Still, there'll be a substantial remnant left over, enough for a bathroom vanity, I'm guessing. Anybody interested? Seriously, we'll probably put it on Craig's List.

 More to the point, I was relieved that we liked the color and pattern of the full-size slab as much as we liked the 12-square-inch sample we saw in the showroom. A good thing, since we'll be living with it for a long, long time.