GrammaLei.com

Leilani loves her cloud pictures, now in this picture I see real beauty.

I’m glad we didn’t take a before pic of this, it would be embarrassing.

I bought the ‘haze’ remover today and found out that it can’t be applied until 10 days after you grout! I was in such a hurry to get it, and now I have to wait. I’m fairly disgruntled about not being able to do anything with my countertop; I thought I would be done with the countertop by tomorrow….
I got the paint for the trim and the walls; they are shades of ’sage’. I’m looking forward to getting the paint on!

I think I’m making progress on the cabinets. I only have 4 doors and 2 roll-out shelves that have don’t have any coats of varnish on them! All the rest, 12 drawers, 6 doors and 5 roll-out shelves all have 2-4 coats on them, the cabinet frames and the island has 4 or more coats on them. I’m glad I went with a water base Varathane, and spent the money on a good brush.

We’ve been misting the grout every so often, so that it dries slowly (going to get a grout haze remover tomorrow). Still looks good! As I get more of the drawers into the cabinets I am so happy with our “New Cabinets” and all that goes with them. The windows look really good.

Did some clean up today and reorganized all the tools and materials we’ve gathered for the project. Getting ready to put up the new redwood trim and new siding. Randy had already painted trim with primer and I got a coat of the stain on. The siding is already primed. We learned a lot the first time around, that’s for sure. Randy got the scaffolding up by the back door and part way down the stairs……..it looks very hairy/scary, but it is very steady. He started taking down the fascia boards and putting up the backing he needs to put up the new siding. We have been looking at craftsman-designed homes for, well a long time. We have found the design for the corbels we both like! I just realized that we found them on a house that is across the street from the guy that built our cabinets! That’s a little weird, but then it just shows how you should always be looking anywhere and everywhere for the answer, when you’ve asked for help.

I took a slew of pics of the kittens today. They were playing in a pile of leaves I had just raked up. They looked like they were having so much fun. Even mama kitty BooBoo jumped in with them…..it looked like she took them for a walk after that. I’ve never seen that, well in cartoons maybe.

As I’m writing this I see why my back hurts, I didn’t mention all that we did today either, I need to go lie down.

More Kitten Pictures

The grout is in!!!! Thanks to Randy. I’m not as strong as I was, when I put the grout in on our last kitchen counter and my mom’s kitchen counter, not to mention the horrible black grout in the black & gray bathroom, that whole room is tiled, except the ceiling and about a foot down from the ceiling all the way around). The grout lines on this counter are thinner, so we went with a non-sanded grout. It was like glue…..no paste. I did the part behind and around the sink into the garden window and just that much and my hands and arms were burning. So, Randy finished all the rest. I did the shaping with the sponge. It turned out really nice and we both really like it. It’s has an ‘old world’ look.

Well Randy did it! He got the 4 V-caps cut and I put them in yesterday. I should be able to grout on Wed. It is so wonderful to have the kitchen back to at least a usable condition!

As a side note…the kitchen island is just great for not only for food preparation, but I started our 5th grand-daughter Sara’s 1st B-day present, and it is the perfect height for laying out and cutting out patterns and material. I really like it.

We have all the tile cut and glued onto the countertop. I started the V-cap (edging pieces) I did the left side of the sink and stopped at the 45 degree turn at the the sink. Randy does the cutting, we bought an electric tile saw for this job, and he has to cut 4 V-caps. I have never put V-caps on before and don’t have a clue how to do it right. Not sure if you put the mastic (glue) on the tile piece or on the top and front edge of the counter, so I stopped for today and I’ll look online to see if there are any how-tos out there.

It’s been a few days now….I have all the V-cap on. I didn’t look up any how-tos online, until today. Seems I did it all wrong, we were supposed to put the V-cap on first…oh well. Our problem now is the 45 at the sink. Making the cuts has turned out to be…problematic, we haven’t been able to figure it out yet.

More Pictures….

I’m sure that Leilani hadn’t prepared herself for the amount of demolition and framing that we needed to do just to install cabinets.

More Pictures…..

We knew that installing the garden window would be hard. However, we had no idea of what we were in for. All the windows for the kitchen remodel were delivered, which is not how we usually do it. There have been only a few building supplies delivered, because of the road to the property, we usually, go get, load up, and drive them up here ourselves. So, we didn’t know how really heavy the garden window was until we went down to the garage, (the delivery guy couldn’t/wouldn’t drive it up the driveway to the house) to see how we were going to get it up here.

After many conversations, many ideas and many days, we decided that maybe we could get it up on top of the suburban, and I could drive it up really slow (which is hard because sometimes you can’t drive slow up the driveway). Our first idea was to put it “in” the suburban, that is when we discovered how heavy it is, 200+ lbs. is our guess. But it didn’t fit in the suburban. So we thought it would go on top. We made ramps with 2×4’s to push it up there, it worked, Randy did most of the work, I’m not very strong anymore, and I drove it up….no problem!

I guess we were encouraged by this great feat, and getting it off wasn’t too hard either. So, we went on to build a ramp up to the back deck. That too went well. So now we had the garden window up on the back deck! We were very confident at this point, (well I was).

Our plan was for both of us to lift it up to the opening, Randy would steady it, and I would put in a couple screws on both sides. Then we would go inside and see what adjustments needed to be made to get it centered.

Once we got it up to the opening, we realized how top heavy it was, mainly because we were so low, the bottom of the widow opening is almost 5 feet off the deck. We had put up a 2×4 across the bottom of the opening for the flange on the bottom of the window to go behind and rest on. So now to get the window down, because we now know itis too heavy for us, we would have to lift/push it even further up over our heads to get it off the 2×4 support. If we had done that it would have crashed down on us and unto the deck and ground below, the deck is about 4-5 feet off the ground. So, while I’m trying to hold it up on the one side, Randy, holding his side with one hand tries using another hand to grab the nearby scaffolding to somehow use it to help hold it up his corner of the window, so maybe he can get up on the scaffold and be able to hold up the top of the window. While trying to wrangle it over, one of the wheels, which were locked, went over the side of the deck, and the whole thing crashed off, for a moment it seemed to me that it might take Randy with it. We are both really losing strength now. My idea was for me to go inside, hold the window from the inside, so Randy could screw it to the wall. When I got inside, I discovered there were only two small areas where I could get a handhold, really just my fingers. At first I was very hopeful, I had it! I told Randy, “hurry get the screw gun I’ve got it!” He said, “no you don’t”, and let his pressure holding the window up go a little. He was right; I didn’t have it at all. So I girded myself to really try hard to hold it, with just my fingers. Its 5 feet wide though, so my arms were stretched out and I have no hand or arm strength, never have. We decided it would be better if he came in and held it, while I screwed it, but that meant I’d have to hold it by myself while he came up the back stairs and into the kitchen and grabbed the window. Randy knew if he let go, the windowwas going to fall , but there was nothing else he could do. He let go ran up the stairs and there I was holding a 200+ lb. garden window with my fingers! He grabbed it and I ran down and screwed it to the wall.

While we were catching our breath, we both realized that God had once again reached His hand down to us, this time to save our garden window.

More Pictures…

We’re remodeling our kitchen……oh yeah, we’re having too much fun! The kittens (we’re always having kittens) were born about a month ago. We decided we didn’t want feral cats this time, so we’re making friends with this lot. They all seem to hate the air compressor that we use for the nail-gun though . We found out when one of them (the ugliest, we call it Precious) decided it should hide on top of the gas tank on my suburban, he/she finally came back, we’re so happy….really. It got it’s name for being soooooo ugly looking. We named it Golam II. The first kitten we named Golam was really hideous, looked like it was barely surviving cancer. This one is pretty ugly, but we didn’t want to stigmatize it, so we started calling it Precious. It doesn’t run from us every time now, knows we’re the ones with the food.