Un-Pausing

Projects tend to get put on pause in this house. They start with vigor but don't quite get finished. This is why we have doors that have been primed to paint, but never painted. Stuff in piles as we started purging out a closet but never decide where to put the stuff that didn't belong there. Walls which are partially painted but the day finished and no one felt like painting the next day, or the next, or the next. And probably why there are STILL cans of paint in the living room.

So this weekend we are un-pausing some projects. Some background on the biggest...

Floors
When we first moved in we decided we would change the kitchen flooring as it is a hunter green faux marble linoleum and the sink in the kitchen.. MATCHES with its hunter green enamel self. The living room carpet was (note I said WAS) pretty nice but after years of living with a cat with a tender tummy.... steam cleaning can only do so much. The upstairs carpeting is a mash-up of what I can only imagine to be SALE deals or free room size chunks the previous owners got their hands on. And we won't go into what happened when Eric removed the popcorn ceiling and then painted knowing we would eventually replace the carpet. Ok I will go into it...he didn't use any sort of protective covering and you know there were drips and spills and uh ohs.

Kitchen
Our kitchen has its original partial board cabinets and to go with the faux marble floor, it has a faux marble laminate counter top too. Someone previous to us decided to paint the cabinets and used FLAT paint. That's right, the paint you CANNOT WASH as it ends up wiping off. IN THE KITCHEN! Brilliant. So the cabinets look like crap. There is actually a missing cabinet and they just put doors over the hole to cover it up. And the guy we bought this place from hired a cheap guy to put in venting for the range hood who CUT HOLES through the cabinets to vent it through the outside wall and into the water heater closet outside and up through the roof. Seeing as this was not approved by the HOA and was not to code, I stopped that work half way through since it wasn't finished when we closed escrow. So now there is a lovely hole running through the cabinets and into the outside shed. AWESOME! Nice and breezy.
Then lets add that some of the cabinet doors are falling off and have been re-screwed on so many times that the "wood" is stripped. I say "wood" because its particle board that is disintegrating.
Oh and the drawers do not have glides, they are wood on wood grinding every time you open them so anything under the drawer gets a showering of particle board dust so I have to wash everything before and after I use it.

Can you tell how much I love my kitchen?

Well, a few years ago.... 4.5 to be exact (note, we moved in 5.5 years ago), I bought some wood laminate flooring to be used downstairs. We had it all worked out. We were going to replace the kitchen cabinets and then put down the floors. That flooring as been sitting next to our front door "acclimating" since the day we brought it home. Our friends ask us over and over, have you taken care of those floors yet?

We have made plans to buy the kitchen cabinets multiple times. We have picked them out, drew up the plans, but never actually purchased them. Thankfully we have also never started the demo because that would be sad, but might have caused us to get moving.

So yesterday, I took the day off and we visited a home design showroom in town that just opened up a month ago. Their parent company mainly works with Banks and property management companies to get properties ready to sell. Many of these places are in foreclosure so the stuff is really reasonably priced and of decent quality. They do flooring, windows, baths and kitchens. You don't have a lot of options for some things they offer and that is how the keep the cost low. AND they do installation.

So on Wednesday, they will be coming out to do measurements and give us a bid on the kitchen, counter tops and the floors. We don't know if they will install the flooring we already have or if we will end up trying to get rid of it on Craigslist, but things are so much more promising now. Since they do installation I have more confidence that this will actually happen. Do it yourself projects have the tendency to stall in this house.

The remainder of the weekend's task list:
Purging a few closets and packing things up that can go away or into storage. The goal is to minimize the things in the house to what we actually use regularly. I have a feeling a lot is going to Goodwill.
I can't wait to get my hands on Eric's closet.... this man has got a lot of shoes (mostly all black) and old T-shirts!