The Plan is Coming Together

I love it when a plan comes together.

In this case, it's a plan started last June, with the first ground broken in September. The Plan will still take a while to complete as there's still a bajillion details that still need detailing, but things are falling into place:

I had three days off between Christmas and New Year's Day. Perfect time for attacking the counter tops. The above picture has the surface all prepared for the laminate, all I had to do was cut a piece that originally was 5 feet wide by 12 feet long to the right dimensions and glue it into place. Easy, No?

Laminate glued down, with the rim of the sink set on it to show the eventual location of the sink. Managing a piece of thin laminate that big is not an easy task but we managed to get it in place with only a little bit of damage. My camera has been acting up a bit lately and likes to trash parts of some pictures, turning them either plain shades of gray or some vibrant primary color.


With the laminate down and the sink in place, it was time to start on the island. Here the four island cabinets are set in place. We decided to set off the island in a different color, giving some relief from the acres of medium maple color.

Another view of the island after I built a half-wall behind it. The top of the island will be butcher block and will be two levels, the first you can see in the picture and the second will be on top of the half-wall to be used as a breakfast bar.

A view of the island from the opposite side. This was before I cut the eight-foot piece of butcher block down to six feet to fit the island.

After I cut the butcher block to length, Abigail helped by putting the first coat of tung oil finish on it.

During all this, Deb was trying to get the ceiling painted before we put too much nice stuff on the floors and cabinets. She enlisted the help of Josh. He helped out willingly, but painting is not his favorite thing to do.

We had some friends over and they helped us with the floor. After all, what are friends for? It took an entire evening to get the underlayment down. The next evening we laid the tile. Josh managed to get most of the pieces that needed some strange notch cut out of them. The mark he made on this piece doesn't show up in the picture very well, but it had to fit around the refrigerator return in the next picture.

Once he cut the piece for this location, it fit perfectly.

Here the tile has progressed around the island in front of the sink. We eventually finished the tiling a couple days later. Well, almost. We ran two boxes short, so right now we have an area with exposed glue by the garage entry and in the pantry closet. This results in some rather interesting tactile experiences for those guests who come into our house. This glue remains tacky for a very long time, and just about anyone that has come into our house via the garage has ended up with at least one foot in the glue. We've heard various expressions of surprise as they attempt to lift their foot out of the glue and are met with stiff resistance or leave their sock on the floor.

While we're working on getting the remainder of the tile (to prevent our guests from getting glued to the floor), we're working on grouting the whole area. This is a tedious, time-consuming task as our indentured servant, Josh, can attest.