Posts By John Petersik

After 15 painfully slow days of waiting impatiently, our kitchen remodel picked back up again this Monday with the arrival of our replacement corner cabinet. Which means that the installer could come over yesterday (right at 8am, no less) to put in the final cabinet (which had to be reordered from KraftMaid due to the fact that the first one was backwards). Mike The Install Guy also took care of a few other finishing touches while he was here: adding toe kicks & shoe molding, venting the hood up through the attic and attaching the last part of our hood- all little things but they made a world of difference (proving that the devil really

They’re notoriously difficult to work with. Yesterday was cabinet installation day 2 and, not unlike Monday, it came with its fair share of ups and downs. We’ll start with the ups this time. Almost all the cabinets went in, including my new favorite thing: the built in refrigerator! Totally makes our existing fridge look like some fancy schmancy custom appliance. And that opening to the right of it will make our microwave look built in as well. Yippee skippy. Here are photos of yesterday’s progress: Ok, now to play Debbie Downer. The minor hiccup of the day was discovering one of our existing wall outlets is too high and needs to be lowered so it

The cabinets arrived yesterday. Woohoo! The initial excitement of seeing the Kraftmaid 18-wheeler roll up outside was momentarily replaced by a fear that we hadn’t cleared enough temporary storage space for the boxes. Fortunately the truck wasn’t full. But I can’t say the same for our living room after the Kraftmaid guys finished moving box after box through the front door. So how does a box-filled living room turn into a cabinet-filled kitchen? First, our Home Depot project manager shows up today to inspect the delivery and make sure nothing is missing or damaged. Assuming nothing is awry (knock on wood, er, Thermofoil) the HD installer will start assembling the kitchen next Monday, Dec 3rd.

Last week we got the call. Our cabinets are on their way! They’re arriving on Monday the 26th- which means we’re finally able to schedule all the installation details. So now it’s looking like we’ll have a kitchen before the end of the year. Happy New Year to us. When we first walked into Home Depot eons ago (i.e. September) we knew two things about our cabinets: we wanted white and we wanted KraftMaid. White because, duh, our dream kitchen says so. KraftMaid because our friend who works for a home decorating magazine swears by them. They’re close to the most expensive cabinet brand both Home Depot and Lowe’s carry, but Nancy Kulik CKD agreed

Feels like it has taken a while for autumn to hit Richmond, but it’s finally here in full force. Its late arrival probably means it won’t be long ’til all the yellows, oranges and maroons are replaced with brown and more brown, so we were sure to capture the fall colors on film while we could. Enjoy!

With a house full of newly painted neutral walls, we’re psyched to have plenty of rooms begging for some art. So hopefully you’ll start to see several posts about good artsy-fartsy finds. We’re starting with a John & Sherry original. When we went on our Alaskan honeymoon in July we took tons of memorable photos, including the one below during a private seaplane flight to a remote volcano several miles outside of Anchorage (yep, I said volcano in Alaska). That field of blue and black in the foreground is a glacier speckled with deposits of volcanic ash. Definitely not something you see everyday. On a whim, I desaturated the pic in Photoshop to see what

Do you ever feel like there are too many options in the world? If so, DO NOT attempt to pick out new counters. Or just make sure you’ve got a wifey with extensive internet research skills. (And if you don’t, hands off – this one’s mine). Here’s what I learned from Sherry’s quick crash course. Laminate and marble were immediately out of the question. We already had laminate and wanted to upgrade to something more natural and less plastic-y. And as gorgeous as carrera marble can be (we loved it in our inspiration kitchen), it eliminated itself from the mix thanks to being much too expensive (about $100 a square foot) and not nearly as