We are finally getting to the home stretch in the burst pipe restoration work. Our main contractor moved all of his tools out of our kitchen for the first time in almost 5 months. We have a 100% functional kitchen to use now. You have no idea how good it feels to say that.

We haven’t started the “decorating” phase in the kitchen yet, but here are some non-cluttered pictures of our kitchen:

Things to note in the pictures:

• The ceiling is a tile wallpaper that was painted with a (much too expensive) copper looking paint
• The refrigerator door opens too close to the wall. We’d do that different if we could
• The upper cabinet to the left of the fridge is awkward as it has a shelf thing on the door. Hard to get to stuff in there. We’d do that different if we could.
• You can’t see it, but our appliances need a good buffing

I also installed a vanity sink top and faucet in the basement bathroom. We don’t post a lot about this room as it doesn’t have any historical character. It has a fiberglass tub/shower, a new toilet, washer and dryer, and a new sink. Eventually we’ll make it a bit more charming, but for now, it is function over form.

Things to note in the pictures:

• The pine trim will be painted white (gotta do whatever you can to make it feel as bright a possible in the basement!)
• The door needs to be stripped and repainted

Also, my office is finally getting put together!

Ignore my fancy desk chair. I know you are all jealous. It is mine, all mine. Ignore the mess on the desk as well, I haven’t quite gotten to the organization part of assembling the room yet.

In the office, we’ll be stripping all the trim eventually. For now, we are going to take a breather from stripping wood. I haven’t made a post about it, but we’ve stripped I swear close to a mile of trim in the past two weeks. We are sick of stripping wood.

Also, one of the benefits of moving our furniture to the main floor is our basement is slowly becoming more manageable:

Still a disaster area, but not nearly as bad. Once we FINALLY close on our loan Friday (yes, it has been almost 5 months since we were supposed to close!), we’ll probably start tackling this mess.

As you can tell, this post is making for lots of lost time! So to continue jumping around, I’m going to show you our new and old baseboard trim. In our upstairs bathroom, and downstairs kitchen, the original baseboard was long gone and we didn’t want to put the cheap stuff back in. So we had ordered some douglas fir and our contractor cut it to the almost identical profile as the original stuff.

New trim:

Old trim:

Ignore the dust. We have given up on keeping the dust away until the contractors are gone. As you can tell, the old baseboard trim is much tighter grained. It also has a coat of polyurethane on it, which the new stuff hasn’t received yet. These are also both stained different colors. The old trim picture is actually a non-original color. We tried to match the old trim with the original color.

Speaking of the dust, we also had our air ducts cleaned yesterday. I’m glad we didn’t dust prior to that as it put a layer of fine dust on top of *everything*. The guy came here around 2PM with their fancy air duct cleaning trailer. He didn’t leave until 6:30PM. Around 6, I asked him how many houses had ducts as bad as ours. He said he never saw one as bad. He had to unclog their machine 5 times. He showed me what was clogging it up. It was literally a 3″ thick layer of pure dust. Yum.