Nearing the finish line

We're back from a weeks vacation in San Francisco! The weather was a lot better than the Florida weather of mid-90's. I wore pants and sweaters the entire week in San Francisco. The contractor resumed work on our kitchen this past Thursday and Friday. It's definitely looking more like a kitchen. Thursday the base cabinets were installed. Friday the above stove microwave was installed and the dishwasher is partially installed. The counter top was cut for the sink and the new faucet was intalled. A lot of the doors are now in place. IKEA has the coolest hinges (manufactured by Blum). It is the easiest thing in the world to pop the doors off for construction purposes. And the door and drawer dampers are awesome. It's practically impossible to slam things!

1,000 Trips to IKEA

I keep hearing that remodeling always costs more than budgeted and takes longer than estimated. So far the budget is ok... but the time is definitely beginning to add up and the mess is getting on our nerves. Thank goodness we have a vacation coming up.
I've made at least 5 return trips to IKEA in the past 2 weeks. So while it's not 1,000. I'm sure I'll get there before the end of this remodeling is done.
Today (day 9) the upper wall cabinets were finally installed. The base cabinets have they're legs attached and will hopefully get put in place next.
Thursday (6/11 - day 8) our shiny new refrigerator was delivered. I can't wait until it actually gets a home in the kitchen and stops sitting in our living room!
Days 6 and 7 consisted of more electrical work, patching the walls and getting the water line for the ice maker through the ceiling. Some primer also got up on the walls. When these cabinets come down in the future, the next owner will still get to see a thin line of the turquoise wall paint. Won't that be fun?

Days 3, 4 & 5

Saturday: Tile guy was here from 8:30am - 4 pm, finished tiling the entire kitchen area. See the link to pictures on the right side of the screen. Multiple runs to Home Depot because the tiles we originally purchesed had multiple hidden cracks in them. We also received our order from IKEA, close to 2000 pounds of stuff. Three appliances, 13 cabinets (packed flat in boxes) and 2 pieces of laminate counter top. Oh the fun we've had building cabinets this weekend. We got 3 cabinets built Saturday.
Sunday: The floor had grout applied. Another weekend morning I didn't get to sleep in :( We started opening all the boxes from IKEA and found some defective items that had to be exchanged. And built 9 more cabinets! Unfortunately we also watched the Magic lose in over time.
Monday: Electrical work continues. We finally have electrical wiring for the new slide-in range. One day we'll get to cook on it. Latest estimate from the contractor is that cabinets will start going up on Wednesday. I hope to see some paint on the walls Tuesday.

Day 2

Nothing too exciting going on. Some of the electrical work has been completed and a portion of the tile installed. The regular tile guy couldn't make it today. So will be showing up around 8:30am on Saturday. Just when I thought I was going to get some sleep....

Day 1

Our contractor arrived at 7:15am on Thursday (15 minutes early). Jimmy had an awesome case of bedhead when he met Paul. All cabinets were removed, tile counter/bookcase combo removed and tile flooring (plus a suprise layer of linoleum flooring) removed.