Young House Love

As in, they take their sweet time. Yesterday was installation day 1, and it didn’t quite go exactly as planned. But then again, nothing in home improvement ever does. It can best be compared to Christmas morning as a child when you can hardly sleep the night before, anxiously awaiting the crack of dawn so you can rip into all of those carefully wrapped gifts from “Santa.” John and I stayed up late and woke up early excitedly chattering about the long awaited installation. Remember, we’ve been completely kitchenless for close to two months (no cabinets, no counters, no sink, no nothing) so imagine our excitement at the prospect of seeing all of our cabinets

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!

To be honest, our bathroom probably needs a total remodel (or at least a new tile job and sink), but we thought a refresher was all we could handle during our lengthy (and expensive) kitchen remodel. So we decided (well, I decided, and then coerced John) to paint the blue walls a soothing tan, and to graduate from a dorm room shower curtain (made of plastic) to a fancy-schmancy fabric one (in a grown up white waffle pattern). We also thought it was time to remove our beast of a medicine cabinet (which actually had two lights coming out of the sides of it like arms) and replace it with an updated medicine cabinet with

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