Sunday, September 23, 2012

Kitchen Remodel Week 7,8,9, ???

This is a catch up blog post since a lot of little things have happened in the last 5 weeks or so.

When the contractor was installing our cabinets, he noticed a few of them had some broken plastic pieces and talked to the manufacturer about getting some replacement parts. Apparently replacement parts are surrounded by entire shelves.
So, we ended up with three entire shelves that we're going to use for something in the garage.

Once the new refrigerator was installed and leveled we moved the food from the fridge outside in to the new fridge. The kids had a good time taking off the plastic.


After we had moved all of the food out of old fridge we wanted to donate it to church, but we needed to clean it out really well. I thought, you know it's outside, so I figured I could get it good and clean with the hose.


As part of the finish work in the kitchen the contractor installed the toe kick.The toe kick was continued around the exterior of the island and looks really nice.
The lights over the island worked out really well.
The windows had previously been covered with 1 inch aluminum blinds and we wanted them to look a little nicer. We chose 2 inch PVC blinds with a "Sand Sandstone" paint appearance. The contractor measured the windows, ordered the blinds then installed them when they arrived.
The real reason we needed to get the blinds installed was to finally move the china cabinet we bought months earlier in to the kitchen. We had talked about taking out one of the windows and putting in more cabinets, but it was going to be too expensive and wasteful of the window that we had replaced  a few years earlier. Fortunately Sandi was able to find a china cabinet on Craiglist and we bought it back in May and have kept it in the garage since then.
One of the great features of most China cabinets is the mirrored back interior. The benefit to us is that it reflects the image from the backyard making it look see through. Another nice looking feature is a built in light and glass shelves that make it beautiful at night.
Now that the kitchen is essentially finished, our attention turns to the outside of the house again. I wanted to be sure that in addition to getting the kitchen looking nice, we painted the exterior so that the flaking paint, stucco cracks and raw metal of the gutters would be covered up. The biggest decision we had to make was "what colors?" We had found a house in the Willow Glen area of San Jose that we liked back in August but didn't write down the address, all I knew was that it was at a corner. So after I got back from being away for a week I printed out a map of Willow Glen and sat down at a computer and looked at Google Street View. This allowed me to view every intersection and check it off my list. Fortunately within about 10 minutes I found the house. We picked some house paint samples and put them on the wall.
We had initially that that "SC - Scallion" or "P" would be the right choices, but seemed way too dark. We went back and picked some lighter colors "J - Jungle Chameleon" or "LS - Light Sage" Light Sage is way too light, so we have selected Jungle Chameleon for the wall color and Scallion for the trim. Let's hope it looks nice when we're done. Now that we've chosen the colors the contractor has brought in a painter. The first step was pressure washing the walls. That broke free some loose stucco and chipped paint. Then he came back and sanded, scraped and applied stucco patch.
Some of the facia boards needed to be primed
Hopefully by this time next week the paint will be mostly done.

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