Progress

Woohoo! Feelin' gooooood, feelin' good.

We haven't made any dramatic changes since the last time I posted, but it feels good to set nightly goals and accomplish them. Somehow I feel on schedule even though we've been working on this kitchen since the dawn of time July. The last two nights we worked on mudding the remaining drywall corners and installing the peninsula.

---The peninsula cabinet is still not installed, but the platform for it is! This was some mighty fine craftsmanship, brought to you by Eddie the carpenter.---

First, we plunked down the peninsula cabinet in the kitchen, shuffled it around until we were happy with its position and then traced around it with a pencil. Since our peninsula is really an island that butts up against a wall, we needed to secure it to the floor instead of the wall. The way to do this (for Ikea cainets) is to build a box that the cabinet sits on. Ikea provided easy to follow, detailed instructions on how to do this:

"It's time to build a kitchen island if you have planned for one. To ensure that your kitchen island is stable and secure, you need to build a toekick frame that you then fasten to the floor and the cabinet. Make it 4 1/4" high, so that you can cover it with the toekick called PERFEKT."

Perfekt...

Thanks again for all the guidance Ikea! I've bought several things from Ikea over the years and usually enjoy putting their furniture together (I know, I'm weird), but when it comes to building a kitchen, they leave a lot out. Don't want to be held liable I'm assuming.

So we Googled a little and watched a little DIY Channel and figured out the basic idea. Build a box, screw it to the floor, screw the cabinet to the box. Simple enough.

Here is a (bad) picture of our outline on the floor.

One great thing about this project is that we got all the wood for our box from scraps left in our house by the previous owner! Free! Ed found four pieces of wood that were 2" x 3 3/4". 3 3/4" plus a 1/2" piece of plywood we bought to build our faux beam, equaled Ikea's toekick measurement of 4 1/4"!!

It's aaaaaallllllll comin' together!

Ed cutting the pieces to size.

And putting them in place.

Ed built the box first, and then secured it to the floor using 2 1/2" decking screws, screwed in at an angle.

Once the box was secured, he used his jigsaw to cut out a plywood "lid" for the box.

Then, since my project was finished, I had to join in on the fun and screw on the lid.

Finished! I probably used to many screws...but it was fun...so who cares. That lid is on there!

With the cabinet resting on top.

On to my project...(Ed's project was much more fun...)

I had to mud the drywall corners (where the old wall used to be).

I did the first corner on Monday night.

I bought some of this.

It's basic paper drywall tape, but with two steel strips running down the middle to give the corners a little more strength.

Also, in places where the drywall didn't meet up perfectly, the two steel strips created a nice crisp corner.

It took a little work though. For the other inner corners in the kitchen, I had used my trusty inner corner tool...but for outter corners...I was on my own.

And the corner I needed to mud was all tucked in behind a door frame.

I'm pretty sure they don't make any tool for this job.

Except my fingers.

It was like finger painting and pottery combined.

Paws up!

There is a lot of sanding in my future I'm sure.... but I think smoothing it out by hand actually worked pretty well!

What's the goal for tomororw night? Buying our dishwasher! Finallly the appliances are coming in! We've been hand washing dishes since April....uuuuugh!! I won't even know what to do with a dishwasher! Haha, jk, I don't wash dishes anyway.