Cabinets... and things

It has been pretty quiet around the old blog lately... Mostly because we haven't made much progress on the cabinets. Well, that's not entirely true... We do have most of our cabinet doors and drawers in:

There are some pieces of the dishwasher to install still, toekicks for the cabinets, and you can even see a few granite samples on the "counter" -- a reality that is unfortunately weeks away. But what's that thing on the left side of the photo? Why, it's our refrigerator!

We made a promise to be moved in by Christmas, so we hired some movers and had them help us move the heavy things into the house. They brought the stove, fridge, washer and dryer, and bed frames over. Suddenly, the somewhat-filled house became a livable place. Only two weeks after we had our first guests sover for an evening. They'd be surprised at the changes!

We've been toting things over for weeks, which meant we only needed movers for the really large things. There's a pile of stuff in the old house still, but we're slowly sorting, donating, and filing everything away. We have a huge list of tasks to work through, but we're knocking them out at a decent pace.

For instance, the laundry room needed some storage space. The area above the machines previously held one modest wire shelf. Home Depot had some Closet Maid kits that were pretty inexpensive (and cheaper than buying the individual parts). They're not pretty, but they work:

I may end up sewing a curtain-type cover for the front of the shelf, just to keep everything visually clean.

Oh, and back in the kitchen, we began the process of trimming the window out again, since all the trim was torn out during the cabinet demolition. To get the trim to sit out beyond a tile backsplash, we had to build up the window area a bit. The first step was to cut poplar boards to fit in the area.

Then, some super thin birch plywood was placed on the inside of the window frame. This covered the edge of the poplar boards, making the window frame look like a solid piece of wood. We cut two poplar sills for the windows, trimming them together at the corner:

The whole window was then caulked and prepared for the trim. The pieces are cut, just not attached yet, due to the chaos of moving. I'm looking forward to crossing that off the list!