Finishing touches

Unfortunatley we haven't been able to post a final kitchen "reveal" because we got to the point where the kitchen was useable and then came to a screaching halt. We committed a cardinal sin of DIY....we started using the kitchen before it was finished! You know how that goes... you get comfortable (and lazy!) and before you know it it's five years later and that piece of trim (or whatever) is still not installed. Well we can't let that happen. The holidays are over and it's time to get back to work. Here are some of the things that still needed to be finished in our kitchen...

A door frame...

A vent cover, baseboards and quarter round...

and some more crown moulding.

We faced some challenges when installing the new door frame. The old walls were twice as thick (some weird combo of plaster and drywall) as the new drywall we installed so we needed to add some extra trim to make up the difference.

We also couldn't find plinth blocks that matched the rest of the blocks in the house so we had to get creative and make some. We found some trim that looked similar and then added filler pieces until it was *almost* perfect.

Not quite there...

Theeerrrre we go.

I'll have to put my sculptor hat on again when I touch it up with wood filler cause like I said, it's not perfect.

But  I'm happy that it matches! You can see the original trim in the background here:

Next we were on to the baseboard and quarter round which was much easier to install since there were no angels involved. And we were lucky enough to find a vent cover that fit at Home Depot.

Then....we were on to the scary part. 

Crown moulding. 

Up until this point we had only cut straight edges for the fake beam in the center of the ceiling. But now we needed to figure out the angles to go around the fridge cabinet and cover the second beam (where the old wall used to be).

---Old shot so you can see the unfinished top of the fridge cabinet---

Nothing makes me feel dumber than trying to figure out crown moulding!! Time to bust out this pic again.

We made so many cuts on a test piece before we finally cut the real thing. 

Also, to make things extra difficult, we had already installed trim on the center beam, and one side of the second beam which meant we needed to cope the crown moulding. Eek! If you don't know, coping is a process where you...well...it's really hard to describe. Here, watch this:

Basically you remove the extra wood that is exposed once you have made your cut. This allows the two pieces of moulding to fit together at a 45 degree angle. 

So I bought myself a coping saw for $8.

And gave it a shot.

Success!!

It looks good in this picture but up close it's definitely not perfect. We will be finessing the moulding quite a bit with wood filler/caulk. I'm still happy with it though! The fridge cabinet looks so snazzy now.

Once we got the general idea, covering the second beam was a little easier. The kitchen's a mess in this pic but I can't believe how far we've come! 

From this...

To this!

There are still some odds and ends to finish the finishing touches (aaargh it's never ending!!!) but we'll get to that final reveal post some day soon. I hope!